On Highbush Cranberries

Walking in the ravine today, an urban greenspace in the middle of Edmonton, where I live. The ravine is an eclectic mix of species, exotic and native, and encompasses a multitude of meanings and uses overlapping in a single geographic space– some commensurable, and some in one degree or another of conflict. The ravine is also a site of natural and human history- once a green riparian forest along a source of permanent water scoring relatively dry and treeless prairie. Until the late 1800’s, the high rolling plain south of the North Saskatchewan was grassland, home to herds of bison and to the Cree who hunted them, periodically fired to maintain it in an open and productive state. Then the settlers arrived, transforming the cultural landscape of the city of Strathcona, now part of Edmonton, bringing with them their notions of gardens and landscape aesthetics derived from European values and land uses, creating neat Victorian clapboard and brick homes with picket fences, planting shade trees, shrubs, lawns and flower gardens. These gardens are the sources of the “alien” species in the ravine mix such as Caragana, a Eurasian leguminous small tree with myriad yellow flowers in spring followed by pea-pods full of [to us] inedible seeds, and many forms of crabapples, seeded by birds, and each tree showing its own unique mix of fruit size and shape, and rowan or mountain ash, full of bitter red-orange fruits beloved of birds. Some garden weeds also multiply in the ravine: exotic “Russian orchids” (a tall species of patience flower or touch-me-not with magenta or white flowers), which find the moist and fertile soil beside the creek congenial, thistles, which thrive on disturbance everywhere, dandelions in grassy places along the trails. But there are plenty of indigenous species too: balsam poplar and aspen [Populus balsamifera and P. tremuloides], pin cherry and chokecherry [Prunus pensylvanica and P. virginiana], saskatoon [Amelanchier alnifolia and red willow [Cornus stolonifera which is not a “true” willow as botanists reckon it, but rather a form of dogwood]. Soapberry or russet buffaloberry [Shepherdia canadensis] and highbush cranberry [Viburnum opulus], hanging with glowing scarlet oval fruits in heavy clusters also grow along the trails. Many of the indigenous shrubs have various tones of berries [in the popular sense of small round fruits], some food for wildlife, and some edible by people. As I walk in the summer and fall, I snack on the various fruits as they ripen, and contemplate the role they played in the diet of the Plains Cree before they were displaced from this part of their homeland. Saskatoons were sweet and abundant this year, despite considerable dry weather, but are now dried up. Pincherries were an occasional tart snack. Chokecherries I leave alone for the unpleasantness of their puckery skins, though I have tasted local chokecherry wine that was superb, and they were an important component of pemmican according to a Lakota acquaintance I knew years ago. Today the highbush cranberries are ripe, and I sucked the juice from various translucent ovals, refreshing in the heat, and discarded the large flat seeds, perhaps propagating more cranberry bushes for the future. These fruits are not related to cranberries that grow in mossy spruce forests or bogs in the northern forests of Canada and Eurasia, nor to the large now domesticated cranberries of New England’s bogs. Those are low growing plants of the heath family which favour acidic soils, and require you to bend to the ground to pick their fruit. “Lowbush” cranberries [also known as lingonberries in Scandinavia] and bog cranberries [the commercial cranberry and a couple of small related wild species of sphagnum bogs] lack large seeds. Our seedy, juicy “cranberries” that grow on tall shrubs with maple-shaped leaves do not much resemble these, but they do share a tart, acidic “cranberry” taste and red colour; hence the English common name. The Cree in this part of the world appreciated the fruits of the two species of Viburnum that grow in northern Alberta (Viburnum opulus and V. edule; nepinana and moosomina in Cree). Viburnum edule is often called “mooseberry” by Cree when they refer to it in English, a translation of the Cree name for the plant. (The bark and buds also have a number of medicinal uses which are summarized in Plants of the western Boreal Forest and Aspen Parkland by Johnson, Kershaw, MacKinnon and Pojar; more on Cree and Dene uses of highbush cranberries can be found in the book Aboriginal Plant Use in Canada's Northwest Boreal Forest by Robin Marles and his co-authors).

As I was appreciating the abundance and fruitfulness of the highbush cranberry here in Edmonton, I thought back to a conference I attended in northwest British Columbia this past June, called Challenging the Paradigm, a focussed look at alternative ways of teaching and learning to help make education more relevant and accessible to First Nations/Indigenous students [and to broaden the perspectives of non-Indigenous students and educators as well]. One of the presentations described a field school looking at cultural landscape and environment in Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands). Ecological change is having strong impacts on Haida Gwaii, and making access to certain prized cultural plants difficult. One such change was the introduction of coastal blacktail deer, which were formerly absent on the Islands. The notion was that deer would provide a food source Haida could hunt [the indigenous Dawson caribou having been extirpated in the 1880’s]. However, there are no natural predators for deer in Haida Gwaii....so predictably, the deer multiplied exponentially.... and they are now wiping out many native and culturally important plants which formerly served as food and medicine, from the implausibly spiny devils club (Oplopanax horridus, a medicinal plant related to ginseng) to various edible berry species. One of the highlights of the presentation was that two highbush cranberry bushes hlaayaa hlk’a.aay (Viburnum edule) were discovered by the field school on northern Moresby Island.....doubling the known number of highbush cranberry bushes remaining on the islands....I thought of my Haida colleagues, and reflected what wealth they would see in our neglected, unremarked highbush cranberry in the ravine in Edmonton.

In writing this blog, I referred to Nancy Turner’s lovely book Plants of Haida Gwaii to see what the uses and importance of highbush cranberry were to the Haida. First I learned that cakes of highbush cranberry mixed with hemlock cambium [sweet inner bark of the western hemlock tree] were highly valued food of important persons. Then I learned that they have a lovely traditional narrative detailing how highbush cranberry got to Haida Gwaii (p. 111). The gist of the story is that raven Yaahl was treated by the beavers to wonderful meals of salmon, highbush cranberry, and mountain goat organ meat. He was so impressed that he stole the lake (despite the strenuous efforts of the beavers to prevent him), with its cranberry rich shores and productive fish traps, and carried it to Haida Gwaii, where he unrolled it “and he kept the fish trap and the house to teach the people of Haida Gwaii and the Mainland how to live.” The little tale continues to state “Since then there have been many highbush cranberries in Haida Gwaii.” Sadly, with environmental change this is no longer the case. I thought of my Haida colleagues, and reflected what wealth they would see in our neglected, unremarked highbush cranberry in the ravine in Edmonton.