On Cranberries

Lowbush cranberry or lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea growing in moss under pine. Southern Yukon 2004.
A year ago I wrote more generally on the ethnobiology of Thanksgiving. Today I want to write about cranberries. Botanists have been somewhat indecisive about whether cranberries are, as it were, a red wetland-dwelling blueberry with a very tart flavour, or whether they should be segregated in a genus of their own, Oxycoccus (‘sour ball’) because of their trailing stems and vine life form, and their azalea like pink flowers which differ from the little heather urn-shaped flowers of blueberries, blaeberries, huckleberries, whortleberries, bilberries and their ilk. And of course their eponymous sour fruits, while blueberries are generally sweet when ripe. The cranberry of commerce is the large New England species designated Vaccinium macrocarpon if we take the position that “true” cranberries belong in the genus Vaccinium. This is the large tart berry associated with Thanksgiving sauces and jellies, and now ubiquitous in the form of jugs of sweetened cranberry juice and also common as dried sweetened cranberries. These cranberries find their native habitat in acidic wetlands, that is, in peat bogs. In the course of researching this blog I have learned that, although natural wetlands were formerly the sites of cranberry cultivation, now industrial cultivation involves stripping the fertile soil and leveling the future cranberry field, and surrounding it with dikes made of the topsoil, while placing acidic sand on the carefully leveled field. These diked fields are then managed in a manner reminiscent of rice paddies, being carefully flooded at specific times in the growth and harvest cycle of the fruit. I read that industrially produced cranberries are harvested by flooding the fields and sucking up the floating berries with huge mechanical harvesters. These fruits, often bruised, then are immediately processed into canned cranberry jelly or sauce or perhaps for juice. Apparently to get a quality that can be sold as unfrozen berries, you have to harvest the fruit dry, and humans run the machines that pick these higher quality berries, a mere 2 or 3% of the cranberry harvest. At some point in the past, there was a scare about pesticide contamination, so industrial growers are now very careful with the chemicals they apply.
Although a lot of commercial cranberries are no longer cultivated in wetlands, cultivation on the periphery of wetlands in soils naturally moist and acidic still occurs. This cultivation has the predictable effect of altering the hydrology of wetland areas, and can introduce chemical contamination from agricultural chemicals (e.g. nitrogen or pesticides) applied to the crop. As bogs are naturally highly oligotrophic (low in nutrients) this can cause decline in native bog species on the periphery of the cultivated area and invasion of weedy species, threatening unique bog ecosystems. Not to mention the decline of biodiversity in the cultivated plots themselves. Cranberry cultivation has been one of the threats to Burns Bog, a large peatland wetland area on the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia which exists in the midst of extensive urban and cultivated agricultural landscapes. This site is highly revered for its wildland bog habitat and recreation potential within the Lower Mainland, but has also been threatened with a number of schemes for its transformation or elimination, from housing developments to landfills, and its sensitive hydrology is threatened by various proposed dikes and drainage ditches. I recall learning about the environmental risks of the commercial cultivation when I still lived in BC, and there was concern about contamination with agricultural chemicals. This led me to try to buy organic cranberry products whenever possible.
What makes a cranberry? The classic cranberries of bogs (Vaccinium macrocarpon, V. palustris, V. oxycoccus) are viney evergreen members of the heath family living in peatlands, and which have persistent tart red fruits that develop from lovely spreading pink flowers. In northwestern North America we would call these “bog cranberries” and our local species has much smaller leaves and fruits than the classic cranberry of commerce, and is much lower in productivity. The taste is the same. And we also have what we would call “low bush cranberry”, which I have also seen rendered as “mountain cranberry”. This is Vaccinium vitis-idaea, the “blueberry” ‘grapevine of Mt. Ida’, also a low growing, but not viney, member of the genus Vaccinium with glossy evergreen leaves, usually growing in moss…but here the feather moss of spruce or pine stands, not usually of sphagnum bogs….which has small tart red fruits that taste like cranberries. These develop from classic heather family urn shaped flowers of white or very pale pink. In Scandinavia, where they are revered, they are lingonberries, and a national food of Sweden. When I have the opportunity, these are what I pick during late summer fieldwork to freeze for my Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. Alas, not only was it a poor berry year this past summer, I left the Yukon too early, before the cranberries were even minimally ripe. So it will be purchased V. macrocarpon for me this year.
Cranberries (aka lingonberries) are one of the most important fruits for northern Athapaskans. For Gwich’in in the Mackenzie Delta region of the Northwest Territories there are “yellowberries” nakal (Rubus chamaemorus, the cloudberry) a golden bog dwelling raspberry, blueberries (Vaccinium uliginosum, the bog blueberry) and cranberries. Cranberries last the longest, keep the best, and can be harvested in larger amounts. In the boreal forests of the southern Yukon, Kaska love cranberries too. They are called itl’et in Kaska, and people pick and freeze relatively large amounts. Cranberries can be eaten in the spring after they thaw. Anore Jones quotes a poignant tale of death and survival of a Yupiq woman in her “Plants that we eat” (1986 Maniilaq Association). A woman who was widowed and travelling alone with two small children managed to survive on sparse spring cranberries. One of her two children also made it. This was the grandmother of one of the elders Jones worked with in the 1980’s.
Cranberries are good for more than survival. A Kaska elder friend said she treated her husband’s urinary tract infection by feeding him cranberries. Contemporary herbal medicine also suggests cranberry juice, or cranberry capsules, for prevention of urinary tract infections or chronic cystitis. Cranberries, along with blueberries, apparently contain lots of anti-oxidants, considered to be cancer preventative through combination with free radicals. I buy cranberry capsules at my local organic food store which I take faithfully to prevent cystitis.
The Wikipedia article on “cranberry” mentions that some species of Viburnum are also called “cranberry”, which they consider erroneous. No, merely ethnobotanical…fruits of various species of Viburnum, locally V. edule and V. trilobata have red fruit that ripens in the fall and it is the gustatory quality of astringence, sour and a bit bitter, which makes them “cranberry”, not their botanical affiliation (they are in the Caprifoliaceae or honeysuckle family, and grow on tall woody bushes). Though they have large flat white seeds which make the fruit dissimilar to “real” cranberries to eat, they make a fine sauce or jelly. They lack the large amount of pectin of true cranberries, so the sauce is runny…but delicious. I wrote last fall on highbush cranberries (aka the Viburnums). I’ve been snacking on them as I walk in the ravine by my house. I’ll close now and wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving, and hope they are enjoying cranberries in one way or another to mark the holiday.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry
http://peterwood.ca/res/research/burnsbog/Burns%20Bog%20Protection%20Values%20and%20Management%20Options.htm
Jones, Anore. 1983. Nauriat Nigiñaqtuat, Plants That We Eat. Kotzebue, Alaska: Maniilaq Association.

other sources which discuss cranberries:
Parlee, Brenda, Fikret Berkes and Teet'it Gwich'in Renewable Resource Council. 2006. Indigenous Knowledge of Ecological Variability and Commons Management: A Case Study on Berry Harvesting from Northern Canada. Human Ecology 34(4):515-528.
Andre, Alestine and Alan Fehr. 2001. Gwich’in Ethnobotany, Plants used by the Gwich’in for Food, Medicine, Shelter and Tools. Inuvik: Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute and Aurora Research Institute

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.