Cultivated blueberries exist because one New Jersey woman paid locals for wild bushes
A century ago, blueberries were a wild crop. Then Elizabeth Coleman White, daughter of a cranberry grower in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, offered cash for wild bushes with unusually big fruit, and a government botanist bred them. By 1916 blueberries were a farm crop, some strains with fruit twice the size.
The botanist was Frederick Vernon Coville of the US Department of Agriculture, who began working on the plant after 1910. He was the first to show that blueberries need highly acidic soil, that they cannot pollinate themselves, and how cold affects them. His partnership with White from 1911 turned the berry into a valuable crop in the northeastern United States and grew into a breeding programme still based in Maryland and New Jersey.
All commercial blueberries, wild and cultivated, are North American natives in the section Cyanococcus of the genus Vaccinium. Lowbush, or wild, blueberries grow on small plants and yield pea-sized fruit averaging 0.3 grams. They are not planted but managed on open fields called barrens, pruned or burned every two years in a method resembling pre-Columbian slash and burn. Each plant spreads underground stems into a large patch called a clone, genetically distinct from its neighbours, and prefers soil with a pH between 4.2 and 5.2. Highbush blueberries are the taller cultivated kind.
The fruit starts pale green, turns reddish-purple and ends blue, coated in a powdery wax known as the bloom, with a flared crown at the tip. Depending on climate, altitude and latitude, northern hemisphere harvests can fall anywhere from May to August. Canada led lowbush production in 2024, while the United States grew 29 percent of the world's highbush crop. Highbush plants reached Europe only in the 1930s, and North American species are now farmed in Australia, New Zealand and South America.
Plenty of other berries borrow the name. Europe's bilberry, Vaccinium myrtillus, is what the Scots call blaeberry and the Norwegians blåbær, and huckleberries fill a similar role in North America. The Andes have their own species, gathered wild and sold locally. In French, myrtilles usually means the European bilberry, while bleuets means the North American blueberry.
Source: Blueberry
