Wild Guide: Common Blackberry

Rubus allegheniensis

Status

Native

Size

5 feet; spread: 8 feet

Distribution

Statewide

Common blackberry is a fast-growing, colony-forming shrub. It flowers from April to June. The blooms are showy with five white petals. The shrub bears fruit from June through August. Deep-violet to black berries, approximately ¾ inch long, grow in abundance on these shrubs. For generations, berry-pickers have braved the maze of blackberry brambles, the scratches, and the chiggers to collect these juicy berries for pies, preserves, or just plain eating.

Human Connections

The common blackberry is very popular as an edible landscaping plant. Blackberries are nutritious and are a good source of vitamins C and K, manganese, fiber, and antioxidants, with a low glycemic index. Many people rank them as a “superfood,” since they’re high in nutrients, fiber, and antioxidants and low in carbohydrates and fat.

Blackberry recipes abound, and it seems that people come up with new culinary uses for them each summer.

Ecosystem Connections

Blackberries also provide benefits for wildlife — the flowers are excellent sources for pollinators, and the fruits are loved by songbirds and other animals.

Deer eat the fruit and browse the tender canes. Other mammals that eat blackberry fruits or other plant parts include elk, foxes, bears, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, mice, and chipmunks. It also makes up much of a turkey’s summer diet. The list of other birds that eat blackberry fruits is long. And the prickly briar patch provides much-needed shelter for small mammals and nesting birds.

Blackberry flowers (very similar to wild rose or strawberry flowers) are a favorite nectar source for many pollinators, while a variety of insects consume the leaves, sap, stalks, or other plant parts of blackberry bushes.