White and Greenish 



on color until it and the ovary together become a so-called berry, 

 whose seeds are dropped far and wide by birds and beasts. " The 

 name huckleberry, which is applied indiscriminately to several 

 species of Vaccinium and Gay/ussacia," says Professor L. H. Bailey, 

 "is evidently a corruption of whortleberry. Whortleberry is in 

 turn a corruption of myrtleberry. In the'Middle Ages, the true 

 myrtleberry was largely used in cookery and medicine, but the 

 European bilberry or Vaccinium so closely resembled it that the 

 name was transferred to the latter plant, a circumstance commemo- 

 rated by Linnaeus in the giving of the name Vaccinium Myrtillus 

 to the bilberry. From the European whortleberry the name was 

 transferred to the similar American plants." 



A common little bushy shrub, not a true blueberry, found in 

 moist woods, especially beside streams, from New England to the 

 Gulf States, and westward to Ohio, is the Blue Tangle, Tangleberry, 

 or Dangleberry (G. frondosa). It bears a few tiny greenish-pink 

 flowers dangling from pedicels in loose racemes, and correspond- 

 ing clusters of most delicious, sweet, dark-blue berries, covered 

 with hoary bloom in midsummer. The abundant resinous leaves 

 on its slender gray branches are pale and hoary beneath. The 

 caterpillars of several species of sulphur butterflies {Colias) feed 

 on huckleberry leaves. 



To a genus quite distinct from the huckleberries belong the 

 true blueberries, however interchangeably these names are mis- 

 used. Perhaps the first species to send its fruit to market in June 

 and July is the Dwarf, Sugar, or Low-bush Blueberry (Vaccinium 

 Pennsylvanicum), sometimes six inches tall, never more than 

 twenty inches. It prefers sandy or rocky soil from southern New 

 Jersey far northward, and west to Illinois. Shortly after the small, 

 bell-shaped, white or pink flowers, that grow in racemes on the 

 ends or sides of the angular, green, warty branches of nearly all 

 blueberry bushes, have been fertilized by bees, this species forms 

 an especially sweet berry with a bloom on its blue surface. The 

 alternate oblong leaves, smooth and green on both sides, are very 

 finely and sharply saw-edged. 



Another, and perhaps the commonest, as it is the finest, spe- 

 cies, whose immature fruit is still green or red when the dwarf's is 

 ripe, is the High-bush, Tall, or Swamp Blueberry (V. corymbosum), 

 found in low wet ground from Virginia westward to the Missis- 

 sippi, and very far north. Only the bees and their kind concern 

 themselves with the little cylindric, five-parted, nectar-bearing 

 flowers. These appear with the oblong, entire leaves, paler below 

 than above. But thousands of fruit sellers and housekeepers 

 depend on the sweet blueberries (with a pleasant acid flavor) as 

 a market staple. In July and August, even in early September, 

 the berries arrive in the cities. One picker in New'jersey claims 

 to have filled an entire crate with the fruit of a single bush. 



240 



