Japanese Wineberry
I read your article about the Japanese wineberry with interest. I emigrated from Holland to Canada in 1953. I was then 19 years old and remember our garden in Holland quite well, which had a couple of apple, pear and plum trees, a souer cherry trained to the side of the house and the Japanese wineberry. It made a delicious dessert. Do you think it might be possible for someone to send me some seeds of the wineberry? You say it is easily propagated by seed.
Cor Van Pelt
To read the article on the Japanese wineberry go to our main web-site:
http://www.fruitforum.net/in-praise-of-the-japanese-wineberry.htm
Regarding the Japanese Wineberry. I have lived in Bucks County (PA., USA) all of my life. There were still a lot of woods and open space when I was a child and we had lots of wild raspberries and blackberries that were indigenous to the area.
We recently moved to our recent home and I was delighted to see there was a pear tree and what appeared to be wild raspberries and/or blackberries in the yard as well as crab apple trees, though although we did not eat them (but did come quite in handy as ‘ammo’ in our play wars when we were kids), just reminded me of Bucks Co. before all the housing development.
After observing what I thought were wild raspberries and blackberries, I started to doubt that these many thorn bushes in our yard were what I thought they were. So I did a search and learned that they were an Asian plant called ‘wineberry’.
I saw a post from someone in Canada, whom after reading your article wanted a Japanese Wineberry for her garden. Sounds like a lovely plant and fruit, but it may not occur to people that this is irresponsible.
As I earlier said, Japanese Wineberry is not native to Northern America or Europe. It is very hardy and disease resistant. The prolific amount of berries it produces, increases the amount of seed birds spread. It forms dense thickets choking out native plants.
And that is the problem. That it is negatively affecting our ecosystem by choking out native plants.
I am happy I noticed these blackberry/raspberry plants were not familiar to me and I might be mistaken on what these thorn bushes are, or I would not have learned this myself.