Shrubs Of The Great Basin: A Natural History

Western Blueberry

Western Blueberry Vaccinium uliginosum ssp. occidentale Her ankles were black from the dirt of the fields, and her hands were midnight~blue from the wax of the berries. In her home, she served each of her visitors a blueberry that was the size of a baseball, as they recall it, heaped over with sugar and resting in apool ofcream. Then she asked them to consider planting blueberry bushes along the Garden State Parkway. -John McPhee, THE PINE BARRENS EVEN IN THE New Jersey pine barrens, blueberries never really get larger than grapes, much less the size of baseballs, but the memory of their delec~ table taste undoubtedly caused them to seem bigger than they were! For the most part, our soils in the Great Basin are far too alkaline to allow blue~ berries to grow, let alone flourish. Consequently, our western blueberry is found in the higher mountains within the lodgepole pine and subalpine for~ est zones, where acid soils may be expected. Typically, it is found along streams or in wet meadows. A small shrub generally about 30 centimeters high, it may on occasion become nearly a meter high in favorable locations. The berries are blue~black and about 6 millimeters in diameter. While they are sweet, they are not equal to their eastern counterparts in flavor. The bluish color is due to a waxy bloom on the fruits, like that of blue grapes. The leaves on the western blueberry are 1 to 2 centimeters long, elliptical or oval in shape, and lacking any teeth along the edge. They are pale green above and even paler beneath. In the fall the leaves tum yellow or reddish, in concert with the trembling aspens, before they wither and drop. The white or pinkish flowers are produced in clusters of two to four at the upper ends of the branches during June and July. The pollen~producing portion, or anther, of each stamen has an intriguing appearance when viewed under a 1 2 9 Western Blueberry WESTERN BLUEBERRY 131 hand lens. The top portion of each anther is drawn out into two narrow tubules, and adjacent to these are two hornlike protuberances. The tubules are open at the upper end, and the sticky pollen comes out through these tubules very much like toothpaste out of a tube as the anthers mature. The sticky pollen readily adheres to any pollinating insects. Anthers which open at the top by slits or pores are the rule for members of the heath family, to which the blueberry belongs. Blueberries have the distinction of being one of the few fruits introduced into cultivation in this century, although both settlers and Indians for cen, turies before made extensive use of wild blueberries. Early in this century, Elizabeth C. White of Whitesbog, New Jersey, the daughter of a cranberry grower, became interested in developing the potential of the highbush blue' berry and offered prizes for the biggest fruit. Frederick V. Coville, a U.S. Department of Agriculture horticulturist who had previously written about the possibility of producing a superior blueberry, learned of her interest and offered to work with her. Coville and White began to grow a number of the more promising forms on her property. The early varieties were forms se, lected from the wild, but soon these were replaced with superior types devel, oped through extensive hybridization programs. The first variety which White and Coville released commercially was called the Pioneer. There are now hundreds ofvarieties produced by Coville's successors since his death in 1937. As important as the production of new varieties was, the development of an entire system of agriculture was needed to grow the plants, which are quite different in their requirements from most other cultivated fruits. Blueberries require an acid, well,drained sandy loam with a pH between 4.2 and 5.2, with the water table preferably not too far from the surface. In nature, pruning is accomplished by the nearly annual light fires which were common at one time in the blueberry communities. Coville found that the maximum number of fruits were produced when the greatest number of two, and three,year,old branches occurred on the plant. Consequently, pruning practices ideally have tended toward this goal-in imitation of nature, as it were. Interestingly enough, the severity of pruning will affect both the number and the size of the berries, as well as the time of ripening...