Bilberry

Vaccinium myrtillus

Acid ground under pine, oak and birch, and open moor above the tree line — usually with moss, usually in light shade. Damp, cool and acid is the pattern; it is scarce on chalk and on dry open ground.

Bilberry — botanical illustration — Bilberryberries all along the twig — herb Paris carries one

Do not confuse it. Two poisonous plants carry black berries in the same woods, and both matter. Herb Paris (Paris quadrifolia) holds ONE black berry above a single whorl of four leaves on one unbranched stem. Deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna) is the more dangerous and the more likely on chalk and limestone: a branched plant to waist height or more, with glossy black berries the size of a small cherry set in a green five-pointed ruff. A few of them can kill a child. Bilberry is neither: a low wiry shrub with many small berries and small leaves along every twig, each berry blue-black with a dull bloom and a tiny crown at its tip, the flesh dark purple through and through. Take none of these features on its own as proof — read the whole plant: how tall it is, whether it is woody, how the berries are arranged. Most mistakes are made by children, who see the colour from a distance and not the plant.

Ripe fruit is blue-black with a bloom and soft to the touch. It stains hands and clothes, and that is normal.

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 Adigeripening73
Piemontedropping2/496
Abruzzodropping0
Apuliadropping0
Basilicatadropping0
Calabriadropping0
Campaniadropping0
Emilia-Romagnadropping0
Friuli-Venezia Giuliadropping0
Goriškadropping2/40
Laziodropping0
Liguriadropping0

The forecast is computed for 23 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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