Recently, I wrote about some of my favorite brambles and before that a piece on pollinators. This week I want to talk about some hybrid brambles that came about through natural cross-pollination from the work of the world’s first hybridizers – bees, butterflies, birds and bats. 

While black and golden raspberries are just varieties of raspberries, loganberries are entirely different. The loganberry is a hybrid of the North American blackberry and the European raspberry, accidentally bred in 1881 by James Harvey Logan, for whom they are named. Logan was unsatisfied with the existing varieties of blackberries and tried crossing two varieties of blackberries to produce a superior cultivar. He happened to plant them next to plants of an old variety of red raspberry, ‘Red Antwerp’, all of which flowered and fruited together. The two blackberry cultivars involved in these experiments were probably ‘Aughinbaugh’ and ‘Texas Early’, which records show were two of the three varieties that Logan had planted in his yard that year. Logan then gathered and planted the seed from his cross-bred plants. His fifty seedlings produced plants similar to the blackberry parent ‘Aughinbaugh’, but larger and more vigorous, except for one plant,  the loganberry. Logan didn’t use a q-tip and go from plant to plant to cross-pollinate them, he used the natural pollinators to do the work and it was just one crazy bee that didn’t just want raspberry pollin, but had a hankerin for some blackberry too. 

Since Logan’s time, crosses between the cultivars of raspberry and blackberry have confirmed the loganberry’s parentage. Progeny from Logan’s original plant was introduced to Europe in 1897 and a thorn-free mutation of the loganberry, the ‘American Thornless’, was developed in 1933. Another bramble that is a hybrid has a somewhat unknown origin. 

In the late 1920s, George Darrow from the United States Department of Agriculture began tracking down reports of a large, reddish-purple berry that had been grown on Boysen’s farm in Anaheim, California. Darrow enlisted the help of Walter Knott, another farmer, who was known as a berry expert. Knott had never heard of the new berry, but he agreed to help Darrow in his search. Darrow and Knott learned that Boysen had abandoned his growing experiments several years earlier and sold his farm. Undaunted by this news, Darrow and Knott headed out to Boysen’s old farm, on which they found several frail vines surviving in a field choked with weeds. 

They transplanted the vines to Knott’s farm a few miles away in Buena Park, California, where he nurtured them back to fruit-bearing health. Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in Southern California and began selling the berries at his farmstand in 1932. He soon noticed that people kept returning to buy the large, tasty berries. When asked what they were called, Knott said, “Boysenberries”, after their originator. The exact origins of the boysenberry are unclear, but the most definitive records trace the plant as it is known today back to grower Rudolph Boysen. Walter Knott’s family had a small restaurant and pie business that eventually grew into Knott’s Berry Farm. Rudolph Boysen’s old farm is now part of Disneyland. These early crosses were done with the help of bees and other insects. Today, most hybrids are done in labs and greenhouses where pollination can be controlled and results are not so random, but sometimes random can be delicious.