Bog bilberry

Vaccinium uliginosum

Wet heath, the drier margins of raised bog, and montane heath. The bush stands taller than bilberry — to half a metre — and the ground under it is wetter.

Bog bilberry — botanical illustration — Bog bilberrycut it: flesh pale green, not purple

Do not confuse it. The same two black-berried poisoners as bilberry: herb Paris (Paris quadrifolia), one berry on one stem above four leaves, and deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), a branched plant to waist height with glossy berries in a green ruff, dangerous in small quantities. The rule is the same: many small berries on a low woody bush against one or a few on something taller and softer. Read the whole plant rather than the colour of the fruit. From bilberry itself it differs in the fruit — longer, paler, with pale green flesh where bilberry is dark right through, and it does not stain the fingers. In the north and east of its range the plant growing beside it, marsh Labrador tea (Rhododendron tomentosum), is the source of the old story about bilberries that make you dizzy: the headache comes from a neighbour's volatile oils, not from the fruit. That plant is not part of the British flora.

Oblong, paler than bilberry, pale-fleshed and mild. On the same ground it ripens a little ahead of bilberry.

Where people are picking now

the best place in the region — not an average over the region. Regions are ranked by today's number.

The fraction beside the stage says how many measurement points out of how many the region was computed from. “1/22” means the weather history was long enough at one place out of twenty-two: the number describes that place, not the whole region.

Trentino-Alto Adigeripe25/36100
Venetoripe32/7192
Friuli-Venezia Giuliaripe15/3176
Kärntenripe2/1576
Piemontedropping2/7661
Valle d'Aostadropping7/845
Ticinounripe2/923
Abruzzodropping22/3616
Apuliadropping31/740
Basilicatadropping20/290
Calabriadropping30/490
Campaniadropping27/510

The forecast is computed for 27 regions out of 583. The rest are not listed — that is "not computed", not "no berries".

Map

The field is built from a network of measurement points, the way a meteorologist draws a rainfall map from a network of stations: the value is computed at each point and interpolated between them. A cell is about 250 km² across, which is the resolution our weather data comes at, and we do not draw it finer: that would be invented precision. Only the “how much” goes into the colour, not the stage: “a little, ripe” and “plenty, still green” look the same on the map — read the stage on the card. Blank cells are where the season history was too short to compute, not where the berry is absent.

All berries, compared for today

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