PNW Native
Ranges from Alaska to Baja California and inland to New Mexico (2)
Blackcap stems have erect, arching branches growing up to 6 ft / 2 m tall, thorns, and a white bloom. Leaves are alternate, egg-shaped, crinkly, deciduous, and ternately compound with three leaflets and toothed margins. Flowers are either at terminal shoot ends or in leaf axils, and they are white or pink and small, up to 3 cm / 1 in wide in small clusters of 3-7. Fruits are highly edible raspberries, initially red but ripening to purple or black, and 1 cm wide. (4)
Whitebark raspberry is resistant to Raspberry Bushy Dwarf Virus (RBDV) (2)
Blackcap is found in ravines, thickets, forest margins, open woods, and clearcuts at low-middle elevations. (3)
The Coast Salish make a rich purple dye from mashed blackcap, black twinberry, wild raspberry, and salal. Berries were eaten fresh and dried into cakes, eaten in winter with grease and/or dried meat and fish, by the Comox, Sechelt, Squamish, Nuxalk, Halqemeylem, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Straits Salish. The shoots were peeled in spring, like salmonberry, and eaten either raw or cooked. A medicinal infusion used to treat influenza was made from the roots. (4) The Northwest Peoples sometimes made blackcap amongst other wild berries into a sort of fruit leather. The Straits Salish, Halkomelem, Stl’atl’imx, and Interior Salish tribes maintained blackcap patches through controlled landscape burning. Blackcaps were found at a 6,000 year old archaeological site in McCallum, BC in the central Fraser valley. (5)
The Duwamish dry blackcap berries, as well as the Cowlitz, who dry the berries over a fire or in the sun and store in maple bark baskets for winter. Blackcaps and blackberries were dried together by the Puyallup. The S’Klallam eats the peeled shoots and young leaves of blackcap. (1)
The Willamette Valley is the site of the commercial blackcap industry, which has about 500 hectares of raspberry bushes in production. (2)
