Saturday, September 02, 2006

Cloudberry

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oooooh! From my part of the world!

Look at that beautiful peatmoss underneath.

Rabamurakas in Estonian.

CKR

Anonymous said...

Hehe, an Estonian berry picking crazy person, almost like me - a crazy berry picking Finn, beat me to the puch! Boy, we sure do go gaga over berries like no other humans in the world. Cloud berries are one of the hardest to pick, though, because they prosper in hard to get places like swamps.

MT said...

Hah! It's a salmonberry, not a "cloudberry," and it's quintessentially Canadian, or else KD Lang wouldn't have starred in "Salmonberries." Next you'll be claiming the Albanians invented the Nanaimo bar.

Anonymous said...

No, no, no!

Salmonberries grow on bushes, and they're pink (raspberry?)!

I'm not really Estonian, Pekka, just love the place. I live a lot further south, but I head toward Estonia as frequently as I can. Sometimes I stop in Finland on the way.

CKR

helmut said...

Oh, goody! There's nothing like a good cloudberry fight, and another occasion for blaming Canada.

MT said...

Well, U.S. National Park Service literature says the "cloudberry" is no different than what's properly known as the "salmonberry." Of course, this is somewhat political. Some scientists will tell you the plants are the same genus but different species. You're not going to find that opinion anywhere in the Bible, needless to say.

Anonymous said...

There are a gazillion Rubus species! Blackberries are Rubus, for crying out loud! Just being Rubus doesn't mean anything more than a compound berry.

Salmonberry is Rubus spectabilis, cloudberry is Rubus chamaemorus. Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe says so. Wikipedia says so.

The Irish call them cloudberries. The Swedes call them cloudberries, when they're using English. Henriette allows as sometimes they're called salmonberries. (You'll like that photo, Pekka!)

Murky has found one of the two sites on the internets that identifies cloudberries as salmonberries. It looks like there is a minority out there that uses this name. We could compromise on a literal translation of the Estonian name, which might be bogberry, but then most people wouldn't know what we're talking about. Although, as Pekka says, that's where they grow, in bogs.

CKR

MT said...

Well, I wouldn't want to stand between a grizzly and a cloudberry either. And didn't I predict there'd be naysayers?

helmut said...

Haha! You said "cloudberry"!

MT said...

I stand by whatever I see myself as having meant from the outset.