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nafex - [NAFEX] Highbush cranberries

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  • From: Douglas Woodard <dwoodard@becon.org>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Highbush cranberries
  • Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:37:13 -0500

Some members were wondering a few weeks ago about variation in fruit quality in this species.

The entry in "Shrubs of Ontario" (James H. Soper and Margaret L. Heimburger, Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1982) states:

*****

Highbush cranberry
Viburnum trilobum
also known as
Viburnum opulus variety americanum

A coarse upright shrub growing to a height of 3 or 4 metres. Branchlets smooth and gray to brownish-gray.

Leaves...petioles [leaf stem] 1-4 cm long, conspicuously grooved, with a pair of slender thick-tipped stipules at the base and *several small club-shaped glands* near the junction with the [leaf] blade...

...Fruit a round or ellipsoid, orange to red, juicy, berrylike drupe; in open clusters; Aug. and Sept.

In damp soil around swamps and bogs and along streams of in low cool open woods and thickets.

Note: The fruit can be used to make a delicious jelly, especially tasty with meat.

V. opulus is the European guelder-rose, a species often planted as an ornamental in southern Ontario and occasionally found as an escape along roadsides and in woods. It resembles V. trilobum very closely but differs in having bristle-tipped stipules and the glands at the junction of the petiole and blade are *concave with saucerlike discs*. The fruits of V. opulus often remain on the bush all winter, and although they look as if they should be attractive to birds, they are apparently scorned until all other food is gone, and even then they are eaten reluctantly.

Some botanists consider the differences between the European and the American high-bush cranberry to be worthy of recognition only at the varietal level, as in the synonym given.

*****

Stipule: a leaflike or scaly appendage, one at each side at the bas eof thew petiole of a leaf.

*****

The glands on the leaf stem are just visible to the naked eye.

My limited experience is that the fruit of the European highbush cranberry eaten raw tastes foul.

Observation and reading says that the European species is quite common in Ontario and I suspect elsewhere, including nursery sales.

I don't know anything about variation in the fruit quality of the native species but that possibility should not be excluded. Don't be too quick to write off the native species: try a cultivar or plants from a line known to produce good-tasting fruit.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada




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