this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
103 points (96.4% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26890 readers
1783 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

First, note that there are a number of plants called the "huckleberry".

My guess is that @daltotron@lemmy.world has good odds of talking about Vaccinium membranaceum. I've had that in Idaho, and consider it to be pretty good.

People pick it in the wild, but it hasn't been successfully domesticated. Much of the plant lives underground, and it depends on very specific conditions that are hard to reproduce on farms. You can buy some wild-foraged berries, but they're a pain to get, so available for limited periods of time and relatively-expensive.

I don't believe that those grow in Europe, and in fact, looking online, the name "huckleberry" only showed up in the Americas, after European colonists misidentified an American berry as the European-native "hurtleberry". You might be thinking of a different type of berry; googling, I don't see people talking about huckleberries in the Nordics.

We also have a plant called "huckleberry" around the Bay Area in California, Vaccinium ovatum, which is easier to find in the wild, grows larger and more (albeit smaller) but a lot less impressive, in my experience.

[โ€“] Dasus@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

It's a variety of bilberry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinium_myrtillus

The name huckleberry comes from "hurtleberry" -> "whortleberry"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huckleberry#Nomenclature

[1]Cited as "U.S. 1670" in Onions, CT (1933). Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1 (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p.

No-one misidentified anything, per se. Taxonomy in the 1600's just wasn't anywhere near what it is today, and you'd be well in your rights calling the berry with the same name, just like I'm sure you call apples apples instead of going by the variety of subspecies. (And "apple" used to even mean even wider set of fruits. That's where the word for "orange" here in the Nordics comes from, "Appelsin" = "Chinese Apple")