Loganberry

Loganberry is a genuine accidental hybrid, created in 1881 in the garden of James Harvey Logan, a real, well-documented judge and amateur botanist who served as Santa Cruz County District Attorney in the 1870s and as a Superior Court judge through the 1880s and 1890s. Logan had planted wild California blackberry (Rubus ursinus) near a "Red Antwerp" raspberry variety (Rubus idaeus), and the two crossed on their own, producing what was, at the time, considered an impossible cross between a blackberry and a raspberry. He named the resulting berry after himself. The plant produces vigorous, distinctly thorny trailing canes up to 15 feet long, requiring trellising, genuinely different in growth habit from most upright modern blackberry varieties. Loganberry went on to become a genuinely foundational parent in American bramble breeding: it is a direct ancestor of both the boysenberry and the olallieberry, also documented in this database, and much of the 20th century's Pacific Northwest berry breeding work traces back through it. The fruit is a deep wine-red, with a real, distinctive tart flavor genuinely different from either parent species — closer to a tart raspberry than a sweet blackberry.