In this week’s post, we’ll look at another way the lack of winter foliage reveals wild edibles for later in the year. When the understory is smothered with leaves and thorns, it can be hard to know if anything buried under there is worth fighting to reach. In the winter, however, we can see the stems and note the location for future foraging forays.
Here are a few of the central MD canes and brambles you might encounter on a winter hike, with photos to help tell them apart.
Blackberry: most of the local wild blackberries appear to be Rubus pensilvanicus. There are also Alleghany blackberries (Rubus allegheniensis) in the area, and they have narrower leaflets. (I am not sure there is a way to tell them apart by winter stems… I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen an Alleghany blackberry).
Blackberry canes have wicked sharp thorns, and often feature furrows and ridges lengthwise along the stem. They may be branched or not, depending on whether the tip of the cane was injured during the previous year. (“Tipping” is a pruning approach used for domestic blackberries because the branches will produce more fruit than a single long cane.)
Black raspberry: The other native bramble species, Rubus occidentalis, can be easily distinguished from blackberries by the purplish coloring on the stems. Like blackberries, the fruit grows on biennial canes that grow one year, survive over the winter, and flower the following year.
The new canes that grow the following year will also have an eye-catching color, though light blue rather than purple. The black raspberry’s thorns are also thankfully smaller than those of blackberries.
Wineberry: Black raspberries often share a habitat with Rubus phoenicolasius, a non-native bramble species.
In addition to thorns, wineberry canes bristle with red prickly hairs. In roadside thickets of brambles, the reddish color makes wineberries stand out almost as much as the purple stems of black raspberries.
Multiflora Rose: Rosa multiflora, technically foragable but not really interesting due to its small flowers and fruit (called “hips”). A non-native invasive species in central MD, this is the only kind of wild rose I have encountered so far.
While similar to blackberry canes, the multiflora roses of my acquaintance tend to be more upright (rather than long and arching); more likely to have branches; and less likely to be deeply furrowed than blackberries. Oh, but the thorns are just as sharp!
The last two plants in this post are visually similar to the previous ones, although they are not related. (Blackberries, raspberries, wineberries and roses are all members of the Rosaceae family.)
Elderberry: The winter form of Sambucus canadensis shares the long, arching leafless stems of the previously discussed canes.
You can tell elderberry by the lack of thorns, the larger size compared to the other canes discussed in this post, the scars from last year’s leaf stems, and the raised bumps on the bark.
Greenbrier: Smilax rotundifolia is a small sprawling vine that also has a thorny stem that looks similar to roses.
However roses stems are pale green or sometimes red (depending on the amount of cold it has been exposed to), while greenbrier sports glossy green stems, which look almost artificially colored compared to the dull, washed out shades of most winter plants.