A Comprehensive A-Z List Of Berry Types From Acai To Tayberry
Chris is a gardening writer and nature enthusiast. He graduated from Oxford Brookes University in 2022 with an MA in Psychology. Chris works with the Leeds Green Action Society, helping their food cooperative by growing various fruit and vegetables on their two allotments in Hyde Park, Leeds.
Reviewed By COLIN SKELLY
Colin is a Horticulturist and Horticultural Consultant with experience in a range of practical and managerial roles across heritage, commercial and public horticulture. He holds the Royal Horticultural Society’s Master of Horticulture award and has a particular interest in horticultural ecology and naturalistic planting for habitat and climate resilience.
Contributions From DAVE GOULSON
Dave Goulson is the Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex and a specialist in the Ecology & Conservation of bees and other insects. He founded the charity the Bumblebee Conservation Trust in 2016 - which now has over 12,000 members - and he is the Director of The Buzz Club. Dave has published more than 300 scientific articles and several books on ecology and insect conservation, including Gardening For Bumblebees.
If you look around while walking through the British countryside it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll come across a berry of some sort.
Many of these are recognisable: blackberries, elderberries, raspberries and the like.
Others, less so – would you be able to tell a mulberry from a tayberry, for example?
“Berries are probably one of the easiest crops to grow in your garden, requiring only an annual prune and perhaps a mulch with compost,” says Master Horticulturist Colin Skelly.
“There’s also a berry for every size of garden, from a strawberry in a pot to sea buckthorn growing in a large shrub.”
Here we’ve pulled together 24 berry types, some of which you may be familiar with, others waiting to be discovered.
All in the list are edible, with the notable exception of elderberries which must be cooked first!1Wilson, C. (2021, April 1). How to pick and cook elderberries. BBC Good Food. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/berry-bonanza
We’ve bunched different varieties of the same berry together (raspberries and black raspberries, for example, or strawberries and pine berries) for ease of navigation.
Acai Berry
Acai berries have been around for a long while but it’s only in recent years that they started to take the western world by storm.
These humble berries are said to carry all sorts of benefits.2Benefits of Acai & How to Prepare Them. (2023, March 9). Holland & Barrett. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://www.hollandandbarrett.com/the-health-hub/food-drink/nutrition/benefits-of-acai/
We’ll reserve judgement on those things, but we do know this: acai berries go great in a smoothie or sprinkled over a bowl of porridge.
Barberry
Technically called Berberis, these berries are bright red and very eye-catching.
Hailing from such a wide region, barberries have found their way into many cuisines around the world.
While they’ve mainly disappeared from European dishes in recent years, they’re still a mainstay in the Middle East.
Sugar is often used to reduce the sour hit these berries carry, and their extract is used as a flavouring in a wide range of food items.
Bilberry
These round blueberries, also called European blueberries, for this reason, hail from Europe.3Bilberry. (n.d.). National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/bilberry#:~:text=The%20bilberry%20bush%20is%20native,purposes%20since%20the%20Middle%20Ages.
These berries are commonly used in jams, pies, juices and other traditional berry-based fares.
They’re also the base for a liqueur in France, Italy, and Romania (called afinata, after the Romanian name for the fruit).
Blackberry
We’ve finally arrived at the first of the main berries in this list, and by that we mean the ones the average Brit is likely to be able to reliably identify in the wild.
Blackberries are delicious, and because of that, you’ll see them everywhere. It’s one of the main squash flavours; countless jams contain it, and so on.
The observant amongst you may have noticed that when you pick a blackberry the centre stays inside the fruit, as opposed to when you pick a raspberry and it stays on the plant.
The presence or absence of this hollow is the best way to distinguish berries, raspberries, and their close relatives.
Blackcurrant
When you experience a flavour so often in supermarket-bought products, your appreciation can drift gradually away from the pure version of the fruit.
Blackcurrants, in their unprocessed form, are completely delicious.
These berries make fantastic additions to a huge number of sweet and savoury dishes.
Blueberry
Here’s another instantly recognisable berry, and one that has more than its fair share of fans.
Blueberries are the perfect mix of sweet and tart, and as a result lend themselves perfectly to all sorts of dishes, from porridge to salad.
There are multiple types of blueberry, with their names indicating the types of shrub they grow on.
Boysenberry
This berry is an interesting glimpse into the creation of new species by combining existing ones.
After receiving a dewberry-loganberry parent from a farmer he knew, a grower called Rudolph Boysen performed experiments with berry breeding that ended up in the creation of this hybrid.4Boysenberry. (1998, July 20). Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://www.britannica.com/plant/boysenberry
Each boysenberry is a cross of raspberry, blackberry, dewberry, and loganberry.
“I love growing my own food, particularly at the moment, as we are harvesting lots of boysenberries,” shares Dave Goulson.
“They are huge sweet berries and I am eating them every day at the moment.”
Chokeberry
Perhaps we’ll refer to them by their other name instead: aronia.
Aronia berries are sour to the point that they’re usually processed before use rather than being eaten raw, as with some others in this list.
The main reasons listed for its cultivation are decorative and ornamental, rather than culinary.
Plenty of food and drink products do derive from chokeberry, but these are fewer and less common than many other berries.
Cloudberry
At first the name of this berry sounds a little too poetic, then you see them growing – yearning upward from the foliage beneath, brightly coloured in the same orangey pinky-red of a shepherd’s night sky – and the cloud allusion suddenly makes a lot more sense.
You may also hear this called bakeapple if you live in Newfoundland, Knotberry if you’re English, Aqpik if you’re Alaskan, and even Averin in Scotland.
With so many names it’s maybe surprising that these aren’t better known, but those people in the know enjoy the tart flavour, the almost yogurty texture when ripe, and their ability to pair with all sorts of food.
Cranberry
With their perfect balance of tartness and sweetness, cranberries play an important role in our juice shelves.
A grownup drink that’s neither alcoholic nor overpoweringly sweet, but which can be mixed with a selection of spirits to improve them greatly. The perfect drink!
Then, of course, you have cranberry sauce: the world’s favourite turkey accompaniment, enormously popular at Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Elderberry
Any winemakers amongst you will most likely be very familiar with elderberries.
These small, rich purple berries contain an enormous amount of juice for their diminutive size, a fact that combines well with their distinct and subtle flavour to make an excellent homebrew.
The fact that they share a plant with elderflowers, also delicious and also great for brewing, make them a very popular choice for British foragers.
Gooseberry
If there were a list of “berries named after things that aren’t berries”, gooseberries would be at the top.
Name aside though, gooseberry is a catch-all term to describe several species of Ribes, the fruits of which all share a common appearance (if varying in size and colour).
“My personal favourite berry is the gooseberry for its flavour and large harvest relative to area and labour,” shares Colin.
Gooseberry fool is the most famous interpretation of this berry, making best use of its tart, sour, and sweet flavour profile.
You’ll also find it in myriad other dishes though, including a particularly good flavour pairing with mackerel!5Mackerel with gooseberry sauce. (n.d.). Waitrose. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://www.waitrose.com/home/recipes/recipe_directory/m/mackerel-with-gooseberrysauce.html
Huckleberry
We didn’t realise Huckleberry Finn was named after a fruit, but there you go.
The name of this berry – sometimes called hurtleberry or whortleberry in England – is something of a catch-all term to describe berries of a certain size and shape, all belonging to the Gaylussacia or Vaccinium families.
Juneberry
Juneberry, full name Amelanchier, AKA Chuckley Pear, Sugarplum, Saskatoon Berry, and various others.
In short, another berry that goes by a myriad of aliases!
These berries are delicious raw, renowned for the almost almond flavour of their seeds.
They’re also popular in jams, wine, pies, and all the usual berry formats we’ve seen so far.
Kiwi Berry
I was delighted to find a punnet of these in one of our fortnightly veg boxes.
I’d not heard of them before, but was immediately converted to their excellence.
Kiwi berries are also called Siberian Kiwi, Hardy Kiwi and – perhaps most appropriately – Baby Kiwi, and they’re exactly that: tiny versions of the popular fruit that you can eat whole.
That’s right: no faffing about with a knife and teaspoon. No dodging the gristle at the top or the weird white bit in the middle. Just pure, unadulterated kiwi flavour.
Highly, highly recommended.
Lingonberry
Head to any Ikea and you’ll be greeted with the familiar counter serving meatballs, hotdogs, fries and, if you look carefully, Lingonberry soda.6Sparkling apple & lingonberry drink. (n.d.). IKEA. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/dryck-bubbel-aepple-lingon-sparkling-apple-lingonberry-drink-20226767/
This is the first exposure many British folk will get to this berry, but it’s incredibly popular in Scandinavian cuisine.
There, you’ll find Lingonberry in jams, juices, syrups, smoothies, and more.
The raw fruit is also used as an ingredient or garnish on myriad dishes, from elk steak through to meatballs.
If you get a chance to try this berry outside the corporate confines of Ikea, we highly recommend it.
The distinctive flavour, versatility, and presence in a range of unfamiliar dishes make it a very inviting prospect.
Loganberry
Not to be confused with lingonberry, loganberries are hybrids of blackberries and raspberries.
As a result they look like a slightly elongated, redder blackberry, and taste just how you’d expect from a combination of the two.
This berry mix was created by accident by a man called James Harvey Logan, when his raspberry and blackberry crops – growing quite close to each other – joined forces.7Loganberry – The Accidental Berry. (2021, July 2). Trevallan Lifestyle Centre. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://www.trevallan.com/trevallan/loganberry#:~:text=The%20loganberry%20originated%20due%20to,first%20created%20it%2C%20James%20Logan.
A newspaper report from the time explains that the vines grow more like dewberries than either of the parent berries: obviously quite the exciting feature for any berry enthusiasts amongst us.
Mulberry
You can find mulberries growing here in the UK, although they’re far from the most common type of berry we have here.
There are three main varieties: red, white, and black, with each having a fairly distinctive flavour profile.
Reds have a deep sweet juiciness, while their black brethren have more tartness.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of white mulberries is that their leaves are favoured by silkworms, giving them a crucial role in the silk industry.8Mulberry Silkworm. (n.d.). Infonet Biovision. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://infonet-biovision.org/AnimalHealth/Mulberry-Silkworm
Raspberry
Go to any market stand or the fruit aisle in any supermarket and you’re guaranteed to see punnets of raspberries.
These plump, red, juicy berries are widely known and loved around the world thanks to their perfectly balanced, sweetly delicious flavour.
Dig deeper though and you’ll discover that there are also black and even yellow raspberry varieties waiting for you to try.
Each lends a different flavour profile to the famous berry, further demonstrating its excellence.
Redcurrant
Relatives of other Ribes – like gooseberries who we met earlier – redcurrants pack an incredibly bitter punch making it something more of an acquired taste than some other berries in the list.
In jam form, though, it’s definitely a taste that us Brits have acquired!
A slather of redcurrant jam on a joint of lamb – or, if you’re feeling rustic, a piece of game – brings a whole new layer of depth to their flavour.9Roast leg of lamb with redcurrant glaze. (2021, March 6). Tesco Real Food. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://realfood.tesco.com/recipes/roast-leg-of-lamb-with-redcurrant-glaze.html
Salmonberry
Thankfully this isn’t another of Heston Blumenthal’s mad fish crossovers (sardine sorbet, anyone?), but rather a colloquial name of Rubus spectabilis, a member of the bramble family.
While not too well known nowadays, the berry is still tasty, and if you find it while hiking in regions where it grows we recommend trying a handful!
Also keep your eyes peeled for jams and other products containing salmonberry, or for gardens where the plant is grown ornamentally.
Sea Buckthorn Berry
Head to the coast and you might see bushes bursting with bright orange berries. And if, like us, you didn’t think the seaside was good foraging country, here’s an opportunity to update your opinion.
Sea buckthorn is an incredibly hardy plant that’s able to survive the very wet and windy coastal conditions, and its berry is very, very bitter.
The bitterness is underpinned by a huge sour hit as well, meaning this is not a berry for the faint-hearted!
Keep an eye on craft beer labels for this berry: it’s started appearing very occasionally in sours, gauzes, and similar styles.
Strawberry
Who hasn’t heard of strawberries?
Along with raspberries and blackberries these are probably the most popular berry in the UK, if not the world.
Their distinctive shape, their deep red hue and, most importantly, their scrumptious flavour guarantees strawberries will remain firm favourites for generations to come.
Just make sure you try an actual, properly ripe strawberry if you never have. Sadly most of the ones in supermarkets are a mere echo of what the berry should be.
Easy to grow in containers or from new runners outside, these fruits are plump, juicy, deep red and completely delicious: a handpicked strawberry at perfect ripeness is an experience unto itself.
Also keep your eyes peeled for pineberries: a cultivar with intriguing colour reversal – a white berry with red pips!
Tayberry
If you liked the sound of the loganberry then hold onto your hats, because here we have another hybrid between the blackberry and the raspberry.
This time arrived at deliberately rather than accidentally by a man called Derek L Jennings, five years after he patented the idea (who knew you could patent fruit!).10Patents by Inventor Derek L. Jennings. (n.d.). Justia Patents. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from https://patents.justia.com/inventor/derek-l-jennings
Unlike boysenberries and loganberries who were named after their creators, tayberries are named after the River Tay which flows through Dundee.11The Origin of the Tayberry. (n.d.). Fruit Forum. Retrieved March 13, 2023, from http://www.fruitforum.net/articles/the-origin-of-the-tayberry
A more modest moniker, for sure, and one which is honoured by plaques and statues in the region: proof if you ever need it of the regard in which we hold fruit, and berries in particular, here in the UK.
Berry Good!
There you have it: a comprehensive list of the edible berry varieties available.
Whether you like sweet or tart, big or small, native or foreign, there’s something for you to enjoy here!
Hopefully this list demonstrates how versatile berries are both in terms of flavour and application.
They find their way into juices, jams, chutneys, pies, and pretty much any other type of food product you can imagine.
So next time you’re walking through the woods and spot a berry, take a second to find out whether it’s an edible one. And if it is, grab a handful and enjoy!
