Brambles

Rubus — the genus behind blackberries and raspberries — is genuinely one of the most taxonomically complex fruit genera in existence, having naturally crossbred so extensively over millions of years that its exact origins can't be traced by genetic backtracking. A 2019 genomic phylogeny study found the genus's most recent common ancestor most likely originated in North America, then spread into Asia and Europe across the Bering land bridge and into South America across the Panamanian Isthmus during the Miocene, roughly 20 million years ago — diversifying heavily once it reached Asia.

Red raspberry (Rubus idaeus) is specifically native to the area around ancient Troy, in modern Turkey, and was documented being gathered by the people of Troy in the first century BCE. Blackberry consumption dates back to at least the Iron Age, roughly 2,500 years ago, and the ancient Romans used blackberries medicinally. Black raspberry (Rubus occidentalis), by contrast, is native only to North America and was introduced into cultivation in the 1840s by Nicholas Longworth of Ohio.

The Lawton blackberry, developed in New Rochelle, New York, and possibly traceable to French Huguenot settlers who arrived there in 1688, was the first widely cultivated blackberry variety in the United States.

The boysenberry's brush with extinction is genuinely one of the best bramble origin stories: Rudolph Boysen experimented with crossing blackberries, raspberries, and loganberries in Napa Valley in the early 1920s, but after breaking his back in an accident, largely abandoned the project. USDA berry specialist George Darrow later tracked Boysen down on a tip, and by the time grower Walter Knott arrived, only a handful of neglected, wilted vines remained. Knott nursed them back to health at his farm — later Knott's Berry Farm — and, working with the USDA, named the fruit in Boysen's honor. Boysen himself never profited from his own discovery.

The University of Arkansas runs one of the largest blackberry-breeding programs in the world, with a series of thornless, erect varieties named after Native American tribes — Apache, Arapaho, Navaho — each with documented parentage traced through decades of controlled crosses at the program's Fruit Substation in Clarksville, Arkansas. Its Prime-Ark line pioneered primocane-fruiting blackberries, which bear fruit on first-year canes rather than only second-year wood, giving growers two harvest windows in a single season instead of one.

"Bramble" and "blackberry" are used interchangeably in British English — the word comes from the Middle English "brembel," referring to any prickly, thorny shrub, which is why British "bramble jelly" is the same thing Americans call blackberry jam.