Azores blueberry
Vaccinium cylindraceum
Family · Ericaceae · Irritating
.jpg){kind=link}
The blueberry of the Azores, a tall shrub with yellow-green tubular flowers tipped pink, flowering at the end of summer and bearing dark blue berries in autumn.
Uplands · Scrubland · Oak woods
Also known asAzorean whortleberry
How to tell it
A shrub one to three metres, far larger than mainland bilberry. Alternate, elongated, finely serrated leaves that redden before falling. Cylindrical hanging flowers in racemes, yellow-green with a pink or reddish mouth. Dark blue bloomed berries. Range: endemic to the Azores.
What it is confused with
Bilberry
Vaccinium myrtillus
Mainland bilberry is low, half a metre, with round pinkish flowers and small leaves; the Azorean one is a two or three metre shrub with long tubular flowers. And they do not occur in the same archipelago. Both are eaten.
What it is for
The berries are eaten in the Azores and used in liqueur and jam, more acid and less sweet than the cultivated blueberry. It is a protected species, so you pick fruit and do not cut branches.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
The law says
Protected under the Habitats Directive. Picking fruit for your own use is tolerated; cutting or uprooting is not.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.