Why a raspberry is hollow and a blackberry is not
Pick a raspberry and the core stays behind on the plant, leaving a neat hollow. Pick a blackberry and its central stem comes away inside the fruit. That single difference is what separates the two, and each berry is really about a hundred tiny fruits fused together.
Botanically a raspberry is an aggregate fruit. One flower holds many separate carpels, and each swells into a drupelet with its own seed. Around 100 drupelets make up a berry weighing 3 to 5 grams, and a single bush can produce several hundred berries a year. The fruit is ready when it slips easily off its receptacle and has deepened to red, black, purple or golden yellow, depending on the kind.
Raspberries belong to Rubus, in the rose family, and the name covers several species rather than one. The European red raspberry is the familiar one, but there are Tasmanian alpine and Arctic raspberries too. Most have perennial roots and biennial canes: a shoot grows leaves in its first season and fruits in its second. The plants spread readily through underground suckers and, once escaped, through seeds in bird droppings, so an unpruned patch can swallow a garden.
The word itself probably owes more to wine than to texture. Raspberry appeared in print in 1602, built from rasp plus berry, and rasp seems to derive from raspise, a sweet rose-coloured wine of the mid-fifteenth century. The popular idea that it means a rough berry may be folk etymology. In Scotland and northern England people still simply say rasp.
Growers have found clever ways to beat the seasons. In long cane production, canes spend a year in places such as Scotland or Oregon, where winters satisfy their need for chilling, and are then lifted and replanted in warmer regions like Spain to fruit unusually early. Waterlogged soil is the great enemy, bringing Phytophthora root rot. World output in 2023 reached 940,979 tonnes, with Russia supplying 23 percent.
Source: Raspberry
