Plants of the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden

Thimbleberry is a native semi-erect perennial, a rather thin, spindly shrub whose stems can reach up to 4 feet in height but tend to be sprawling.

Stems are without prickles but have yellowish to reddish glandular hair and are usually green in our area as old stems die back in winter.

The leaves, lower particularly, are wide (4 to 8 inches) and 5-lobed, resembling large glorified maple leaves, the lobes being shallow, pointed and unequally toothed. The leaf is long stalked with a cordate base. Stalks and lower leaf surfaces, particularly the main veins which are very prominent on the underside, usually have some glandular hair and the underside can sometimes be densely hairy. At the base of the leaf stalk are a pair of arrow-shaped stipules.

The inflorescence is a few flowers in a terminal loose stalked cluster.

Flowers are 5-part, up to 1-1/2 inches wide, with white overlapping petals resembling a single white rose, with a prolific number of stamens that have yellow anthers, surrounding the central receptacle composed on numerous yellow-green pistils. The styles are unique in Rubus in that they are thicker at the tip than at the base (said to be 'clavate'). The green calyx has lobes tipped with a long green slender appendage, both lobes and appendage are glandular hairy.

Fruit: Fertilized flowers mature into a pale orange-red fuzzy 1/2 inch thick, hemispheric shaped berry composed of 50 to 60 druplets, considered edible but not of great taste.

 

Habitat: Thimbleberry is a woodland plant requiring only partial sun and moderately moist soils, spreading by the underground rootstocks forming thickets.

Names: The genus Rubus is the Latin name for the brambles - raspberries, blackberries, etc. The species parviflorus, means 'with small flowers', being derived from the root parvi, meaning 'small'. The flowers are not small by Rubus standards, but the base word pau can mean "few" and if then "few flowers" we have made sense of it.

The author name for the plant classification from 1818 - ‘Nutt.’ is for Thomas Nuttall (1786-1859) English botanist who lived and worked in America from 1808 to 1841. On his many expeditions he collected many species including some that had been originally collected by Lewis and Clark but lost by them on their return journey. He was indefatigable as a collector but incompetent in many practical matters. Washington Irving wrote of him in Astoria “Mr. Nuttall was a zealous botanist - forget of everything but his immediate pursuit.” He revised and added to French botanist Francois Andre Michaux ’s 3 volume North American Sylva.

Nuttall discovered this plant in 1810 while at the rendezvous for trappers and voyageurs of the Astor North American Fur Company at Michilimackinac. Washington Irving wrote "Here voyageurs frolicked away their wages, fiddling and dancing, parading up and down like arrant braggarts and coxcombs. They feast, they drink, they frolic and fight until they are all as mad as so many drunken Indians." While they were doing this, Nuttall found Rubus parviflorus. Nuttall was on a collecting expedition for Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton of the University of Pennsylvania and had arrived here by hitching a ride with the party of the surveyor general of the new Michigan Territory after his own transportation plans failed. (Ref. #12d)

Thimbleberry is sometimes called Salmonberry, including by Eloise Butler back in the 1900s, but that name is more also applied to Rubus spectabilis.

Comparisons: The most common species that looks like this one is the Purple Flowering Raspberry, Rubus odoratus, which has similar leaves, but larger purple flowers and outside of an ornamental planting that species will not be found in Minnesota. Thimbleberry can be a handsome shrub or high ground cover when grown in the right conditions.

These other examples of Rubus are or have been in the Garden: Dewberry, R. flagellaris; Blackberry, R. allegheniensis; Black Raspberry, R. occidentalis; and American Red Raspberry, R. idaeus var. strigosus.