A deciduous shrub, with erect biennial stems, 3 to 6 ft high, more or less downy; sometimes without prickles, but usually armed with weak ones. Leaves pinnate and composed of five leaflets on the lower part of the sterile (first year) stems, mostly of three leaflets at the upper part of the same, and on the flowering branches. Leaflets ovate, 11⁄2 to 4 in. long, coarsely toothed, green and soon quite glabrous above, covered with a white felt beneath; the terminal one is the largest and broadest, and sometimes heart-shaped at the base. Flowers produced in a panicle at the end of short twigs springing from the year-old stems, small, pinkish. Fruits red and juicy.
This shrub, the source of the common raspberry of the fruit garden (where varieties with yellow and whitish fruits are grown), is found wild in British woods, and all through Europe and N. Asia to Japan. It is only of interest on this account, being of little value as an ornament.
var. anomalus Arrhenius R. leesii (Bab). Bab.; R. idaeus var. leesii Bab.; R. idaeus f. obtusifolius (Willd.) Focke; R. obtusifolius Willd. – This differs in having much more rounded leaflets than common R. idaeus, the central one being rarely stalked. It is found wild in Devon and Somerset and elsewhere in England and Scotland, as well as on the continent. It rarely sets good seeds because of a defect in the ovary, but it has been raised from them and found to breed true. It is said to have been raised in cultivation by crossing a raspberry with pollen of a strawberry (see Gard. Chron., Vol. 20 (1883), p. 12, fig. 3, and pp. 150, 214, 276, 342).
var. strigosus (Michx.) Maxim. R. strigosus Michx. American Raspberry. – Stems densely clad with bristles which are frequently gland-tipped. Inflorescence-axes also bristly and glandular. Native of N. America, where it ranges across the continent from Newfoundland to British Columbia, and south to Virginia. It is the source of several American varieties of raspberry, the European sorts being mostly unsuitable for the American climate except in the Pacific West. Other American varieties derive from R. occidentalis (q.v.) or from hybrids between it and R. idaeus var. strigosus.
R. loganobaccus Bailey R. ursinus var. loganobaccus (Bailey) Bailey Loganberry. – A hexaploid ‘hybrid species’ of which one parent was an octoploid form of the W. American species R. ursinus (vitifolius) and the other the raspberry variety ‘Red Antwerp’. See further in Crane and Lawrence, Genetics of Garden Plants (1952), pp. 239-41. It was raised in California in 1881.
Another blackberry-raspberry cross is the so called Veitchberry, raised for Messrs Veitch by their well known hybridiser John Seden and originally called ‘The Mahdi’. Like the loganberry, this too behaves as a species, coming more or less true from seed when selfed. The blackberry parent was R. ulmifolius (op. cit., p. 241). ‘Bedford Giant’ is a seedling of the Veitchberry.