A little while back, on my way home, I stopped to talk to one of my neighbors who has cattle. He was out feeding them, and they were bellowing and running after his truck. While I was talking to him, I noticed several different types of spring wildflowers growing on the right of way in front of his farm. After we had finished talking, he headed off to feed the cows, and I decided to take some photos. Does this sound familiar? Yeah, I told the same story in my post about lyreleaf sage. I started out shooting the sage, but every time I thought I was done and was getting ready to pack up and go, I’d spot something else. The last one I spotted was a really pretty white flower with a pinkish center, surrounded by white fibers. They weren’t super small, but they weren’t large, either. I had seen them before, a little later in the month, and definitely in a more raggedy state. There had never really been enough left to make a reliable identification, so I was excited to see young, healthy looking blossoms and even a few flowers that were just beginning to open.

I have a great app on my phone called PictureIt that does an incredible job of identifying plants from your photos. Of course, the better the photo you use, the more accurate the identification, but so far, I have found this app to be very reliable. When I put one of my flower images into the app, it quickly identified it as a Southern dewberry. As I read on, I had to start laughing at myself. Southern dewberries are closely related to blackberries and raspberries. Like those others, Southern dewberry is a bramble that is covered in small stickers and likes to grow in clusters. Southern dewberries actually look almost exactly like blackberries only slightly more purple than their darker cousins. Like blackberries and raspberries, dewberries are edible as have a sweet, juicy flavor. Many southerners use them to make pies, jams, and pastries, and of course people also like to eat them fresh off the vine. The reason I was laughing at myself was that I have eaten them, too….but I thought I was eating blackberries!

Even though the berries look and taste very similar, there are two big differences between the two plants. The first, which is the easiest way to tell the two apart, is the time of year that they flower and produce fruit. Dewberries flower in the early spring (late February into March) and start producing fruit in April and May. Blackberries don’t flower until late spring or early summer. Most of the dewberries are producing fruit by the time the blackberries start to flower. The second difference is the way the plants grow. Blackberries like to climb and will spread upwards along tree trunks, fences, and other plants. Dewberries, on the other hand, spread along the ground, but they don’t tend to climb. This makes it easy to tell mature plants apart, but difficult to tell young plants apart. The flowers on the various plants all look similar, but there are subtle differences there as well.

If you like picking (or eating) berries here in Florida, having dewberries and blackberries gives you two seasons of picking, which is great. There are supposed to be subtle differences in the taste of the two, but obviously it wasn’t noticeable to me! Now that I have discovered that there is a difference, I’m going to have to make a serious personal sacrifice and try both types again!