Talk:Dewberry

NPOV

This line: Anyone picking these wild berries can expect to have their hands stained purple and to have many scratches from the stickers, but the taste of the sweet berries is worth the trouble.

Seems to me to be an opinion. I agree with it, but it's still an opinion. --68.184.56.61 04:44, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

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"Delicious"

Dewberry is also used as the common name for other berries of the genus that become dew-like in texture and are as delicious as dewberries.

isn't "delicious" a bit opinionated? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.125.14.117 (talk) 19:53, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

It took me 8 years to reply, but no. PixelStain (talk) 11:36, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Merge with blackberry?

Dewberry are apparently a polyphyletic assemblage of species in the subgenus Rubus that are distinguished from blackberries (also in the same subgenus) by their trailing habit and dioecious flowers. Rubus flagellaris is listed as a dewberry, but has an upright habit and hermaphroditic flowers. Rubus ursinus is listed as a dewberry is referred to more often as California/Pacific/trailing blackberry than dewberry. Rubus ursinus is also listed in the taxobox on the blackberry page as a blackberry. Dewberry does not seem to be consistently used as a common name for anything other than Rubus caesius. The informal group of dewberry species is contained in the better defined group "blackberries", and many "dewberry" species are also or primarily referred to as blackberries. I'd like to move the information about "dewberries" as a group to the blackberry article. The information specific to Rubus caesius can be retained, but per WP:FLORA, Rubus caesius is the more appropriate title for that species. Dewberry] can redirect to Rubus caesius, and the R. caesius article will have a hatnote directing users to blackberry for discussion of the informal "dewberry" group.Plantdrew (talk) 19:48, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

@Plantdrew: I've only just noticed your comments above (only about three and a half years later!). The article is a mess; the referencing is poor to non-existent for some material (e.g. that they are dioecious). Another possibility is to treat "American dewberry" as the English name for Rubus sect. Flagellares; move this article to American dewberry with a hatnote pointing to R. caesius.

@Sminthopsis84: any views? (I regard you as an expert on such difficult groups, given your enthusiasm for Crataegus...) Peter coxhead (talk) 11:57, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

What joy, another apomictic disaster area. Well, it just so happens that the Flora of North America treatment of Rubus is in the same volume as Crataegus, so it is at my side (yay!). The Rubus treatment, though, is an interim one. As is explained there, botanists have not been collecting herbarium samples of Rubus in a helpful way, and much of the variation that has been used for describing species could be due to soil differences. Consequently, it is a minimalist list, and no sections or series within the genus are used. "Dewberry" is not used except as a common name for species 5 Rubus caesius European dewberry, 10 Rubus flagellaris Northern dewberry, 12 Rubus hispidus Bristly or swamp dewberry, 34 Rubus trivialis Southern dewberry. In the front, page 29, it says "Although species are not organized here according to the subgeneric treatment by L. H. Baily (1941-1945), they would belong to his subgenera as follows: ... the blackberries (subg. Rubus, species 1, 4-6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 25, 27, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37)."

Rubus aboriginum, Rubus depavitus (the USDA has a picture of a cinquefoil for that one!) and Rubus invisus are considered synonyms of R. flagellaris. Rubus ursinus is called California or Pacific or creeping blackberry.

Is there a reference for sect. Flagellares? It isn't in IPNI, and wikispecies doesn't even list an authority for it.

Given that the USDA will probably eventually reshape itself according to FNA, I think it might be time to trim material here to match FNA. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 13:32, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Dewberry isn't in my personal vocabulary (anything with non-hollow fruits is a blackberry as far as I'm concerned), so I'm biased towards a merge. I don't think there's any taxon that corresponds to dewberry. Dictionaries suggest it's used for various trailing Rubus species. The picture at the top of this article doesn't look like a trailer though, and I had somebody disagree with my identification of something non-trailing as a "blackberry" on an Facebook plant ID group; they called it a "dewberry". So I'm not really sure what the American concept of "dewberry" is supposed to be, but at least it seems to be R. caesius in European contexts.

At this point, Wikipedia seems to have full coverage of North American Rubus species as recognized by BONAP. USDA PLANTS has a handful of species that BONAP doesn't recognize (I'm not sure if PLANTS goes the other way at all, with any BONAP species lumped). I'm happy to go with FNA (just 37 species, wow!), but that entails hundreds of merges. Though at a glance, FNA has only muddled the situation with Himalaya blackberry further; I've never come across FNA's Rubus bifrons. Plantdrew (talk) 17:31, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

FNA's treatment of Rubus bifrons is very tentative, going with the name that would have priority if merged with Rubus armeniacus. One of the problems here is that theplantlist is, unfortunately, an entirely unsuitable citation for synonym lists for anything in Rosacaeae. I've made changes at both those species pages. Sminthopsis84 (talk) 21:56, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm finding that some define dewberries as having smaller/more flexible thorns than blackberries. E.g here. Plantdrew (talk) 18:36, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

It's not clear to me from the website whether what is being called "dewberries" are wild species or not; she says they are found in a "vacant field", so they could be relicts of cultivation. Some of the cultivars of hybrid berries (e.g. those called boysenberries) appear to be similar. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:16, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

My finding that source was inspired by a post in a Facebook Plant ID group where somebody was identifying a (non-trailing) Rubus as a dewberry solely based on thorn morphology. Dewberry is apparently a folk taxon in the US South (at least most of the people I see making a distinction between blackberries and dewberries are from the South), but not having grown up with the term myself, I'm still trying to figure out how it is conceptualized. Plantdrew (talk) 21:37, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

This article says that the "dew" of Rubus caesius is the pruinescence. This webpage talks about dewberries and has two images at the bottom of what is likely Rubus occidentalis which has pruinose fruits.

"Dew"=pruinescence seems like a plausible etymology, and I haven't found any reason to doubt that dewberry originally referred to R. caesius. So characters that make a dewberry might be pruinescence, trailing habit, or less-threatening thorns. I only know the habit of R. caesius from internet photos I'm not satisfied with, but it seems to be somewhat intermediate on the trailing/upright continuum. Plantdrew (talk) 02:13, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Better sourcing

This article is really poorly sourced, mainly because I believe @Plantdrew 's suggestion that Dewberry isn't a very descriptive taxon. Merging with Blackberry would not only make sense at this point, but it would also result in a higher quality article overall 2600:1008:B030:D25B:F13D:43D1:4B8:3717 (talk) 13:19, 15 January 2023 (UTC)