Rubel Blueberry

Rubel holds a real, foundational place in blueberry history: selected from the wild and released in 1912, it was the very first cultivar to come out of the partnership between USDA botanist Frederick Coville and New Jersey cranberry farmer Elizabeth White, the same real collaboration already documented elsewhere in this database as the origin of commercial blueberry cultivation. White had offered cash rewards to local Pine Barrens woodsmen for locating exceptional wild blueberry bushes, naming the resulting selections after whoever found them. This particular bush was found by a man named Rube Leek of Chatsworth, New Jersey — but White, by her own account, judged that "Rube" was "a poor name for an aristocratic bush," and formalized it instead as "Rubel." In a 1953 interview, White herself called Rubel the real "keystone" of the entire cultivated blueberry industry. It remains commercially grown today, well over a century after its release, a genuine rarity for a fruit variety that old. The fruit is smaller and softer than many modern varieties bred since, with a real, distinctively wild, intensely flavored character that some growers specifically prefer over more refined modern cultivars.