Partridgeberry

At last, reading about plants ahead of time has prepped me for a plant I actually found soon after.

At the moment, I can’t quite remember where I read again about partridgeberry. But it was recently, and whatever I read mentioned that the berries were edible.

I vaguely remembered that from my childhood, but had never actually eaten the berries, or even encountered them - as far as I remember. Plus we all know that it’s dangerous to “vaguely remember” that a plant is edible.

So it was good to have a refresher, and useful to read that the berries tasted vaguely like wintergreen. Because when I encountered the plant again, on the shores of the Mersey River, it had plenty of berries, and I might not have been able to articulate the slightly sweet, slightly aromatic, but mostly bunchberry-ish bland taste they had. It was wintergreenish all right.

Not only did reading ahead of time help, but iSeek too proved its worth - once again. I saw the plant, mentioned to one of our fellow hikers that we kind of knew it, but double-checked with the app since all I could remember was Trailing Arbutus, which,now that I look at it, doesn’t look a bit like partridgeberry.

The moral of the story: read, watch, taste, repeat.