A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
cloudberry
The cloudberry is a low creeping plant of northern bogs and tundra that carries a single white flower and then a single berry, amber to gold, built like a raspberry but larger-celled and softer. It ripens in a few weeks in high summer and is gone. It grows across the far north of Europe, Asia, and North America, and it will not fruit reliably in cultivation, so nearly all of it is picked wild.
Etymology
The English name most likely comes from the ground it grows on rather than the sky, since clud in Old English meant a hill or a mass of rock before it ever meant a cloud. A cloudberry is a hill berry. The northern languages name it differently and more usefully. It is hjortron in Swedish, lakka or hilla in Finnish, multebær in Norwegian, and luomi in Sámi, and Newfoundland calls it a bakeapple, which is said to come from a French question about what it is, though nobody has proved it.
Notes
In Finland and Sweden, cloudberry patches are guarded and their locations kept in families. The fruit is high in benzoic acid, which is a natural preservative, so it keeps for months in nothing but its own juice. In Norway, it is served with cream, and in Finland with a squeaky fresh cheese.