Dris
Native

Blackberries are deciduous or semi-evergreen shrubs with prickly and woody scrambling stems. New shoots are produced from the base each year which lengthen and strengthen during their first year, then flower, fruit and die in their second year. After that the dead branches provide a useful skeleton through which the next year's shoots can grow, creating a dense and often impenetrable jungle.

Like the shoots, blackberry leaves are prickly and are divided into three to five leaflets, very variable in shape and size. Their flowers are twenty to thirty millimetres broad, white or pink. The familiar fruits, made up of lots of separate fleshy segments each containing a single seed, change from green to red and finally ripen to purplish-black. Blackberry bushes occur abundantly in Ireland. They have the ability to produce seeds without having to be pollinated and so each bush is genetically isolated and any chance change in the genes can give rise to a new micro-species. Over 2,000 such micro-species have been named and described, making the group a nightmare for botanists.

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