Bering Land Bridge National Preserve

Cloudberry

Rubus chamaemorus



Description
Range
Habitat
Human Uses

Description

 Cloudberries are members of the rose family. They and many of their close relatives produce delicious berries such as nagoonberry, raspberry, blackberry, and thimbleberry. They can vary from tall bushes with numerous berries to dwarf herbs with a single berry.

The cloudberry is one of the smallest of this group, its single erect stem seldom exceeding eight centimeters (three inches) in height. The leaves are roundish and indented to form five lobes, with veins that stand out from the lower surface. Each plant has a single flower with five white petals growing on the tip of the stern. Male and female flowers are on separate plants. The fruit is red when unripe, turning soft and orange at maturity. It does not fruit in years when heavy frost occurs during flowering time.

Range

 The distribution of cloudberry includes the northern Russian Republic, Scandinavia, most of Alaska including St. Lawrence Island, across northern Canada and south into British Columbia. In Beringia It is often abundant.

Habitat

 Cloudberry occupies a variety of moist tundra and bog habitats, often growing profusely in the company of sphagnum moss.

Human uses

 In many northern communities, wild berries are the best and most important fruit available. Fruit imported from the south is rare and when available at all mav be in poor condition and extremely expensive. The delicious and abundant cloudberries are gathered for many uses. They are eaten fresh, stirred into Eskimo "ice cream" and cooked into jams and pies. These berries and tea made from them are extremely rich in vitamin C. The vitamins are retained well when the berry is frozen or otherwise preserved immediately after picking. The juice has been used to treat hives.

Noted Russian author Yuri Ritkheu, a Chukchi born in Chukotka, begins his new book, Journey in Youth or the Time of Red Cloudberries with this description of the unripe berries turning gold:

The time of red cloudberries arrives in the tundra at the end of summer. Until that time the berries lie quietly in the softly glittering palms of the green leaves, hard-purple, with protruding black hairs, bitter and tart to the taste. They are avoided not only by people, but by birds and animals, and ripen in silence yet a long time. But already the days are gradually shortening, mixing sunny hours with rain and sometimes with heavy snow, bending foliage to earth, where the moss still harbors the reserves of warm summer days . . . The cloudberries were strewn like brilliant corpuscles among green but already slightly yellow-spotted leaves, down in the grass, on the silver reindeer moss, inviting and tempting you to stoop down and gather a handful to put in your mouth, the berries taut, cool, but already filled with sweet aromatic juice.
Yuri Ritkheu,
Puteshestvie v molodost,
ili Vremya Krasnoi Maroshki.
Moscow, Sovremennik, 1991.

From:
Beringia Natural History Notebook Series - April, 1993
National Audubon Society
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URL: http://www.nps.gov/bela/html/cldberry.htm
Last Updated: 22 December, 1995