Week 30: Blueberries, Joseph J. White, Inc., Alix Beeston on Ellena Savage

Cover Image. “Vaccinium corymbosum: Stanley.” J. Marion Shull, USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection.

Waxing Gibbous Moon; 6 Days to August Cross-Quarter Day.

Headnote

Rounding out my quartet of summer berries (fraudulent, actual, or imaginatively so), we arrive now at the blueberry—my apologies to the sweet strawberry, that rosaceous receptacle, which will have to wait for another summer.

Apart from a handful of medieval and early modern instances, most human food crops were domesticated thousands of years ago, during the globally distributed neolithic, or so-called first agricultural, revolution. However, blueberries stand alongside kiwifruits, Hass avocados, macadamia nuts, and wild rice (manoomin) as important crops that only began to be cultivated scientifically and commercially in the twentieth century—although, as is often the case, evidence of indigenous harvesting, management, and multifarious use extends back thousands of years.

The blueberry’s modern, agronomic story goes something like this: