#botany : rubus idaeus

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[lycomorpha]

Eivor's Herbarium: P4 - Raspberries from Grantebridge

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Outside the fine longhouse of our new ally, Soma, stand these delicious red berries. Octavian claims the Romans brought this berry here & into cultivation. I am surprised he thinks it grand enough for "the Empire!"

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As @vikingnerd793 recently pointed out, this game is a comfort game for a lot of us. And although it's a weird-ass hobby, video game botany is a comfort thing for me, especially in ACV. Set in places where I've lived but hundreds of years ago, it's a safe place away from the illustration I make for work & the current UK hellscape... So... I was properly pissed off when the sketchbook I'm making this herbarium in got water-damaged in recent studio mayhem. As if the leaking radiator wasn't enough.

The book dried out OK in the end - the water missed the plants on all the pages so far. This page is just a bit crinkly and writing the text I could see that the ink spread a little on that part of the paper. But it left me feeling a bit unsure of the whole thing for a minute...

Eivor spent a lot of time at sea, though. I'm sure she'd be chill about minor mishaps like water damage, wiping the blood of her enemies of plant specimens, etc. So I'm sticking with it.

Why are there giant raspberries in 9th century England anyway?

School history class told me the Romans brought raspberries around Europe, and that raspberry seeds have been found in Roman forts here. Raspberry plants (Rubus idaeus) are related to the cloudberries we also see in game, and are part of the same family as roses. Although spread far and wide as a food plant (since well before the Romans, apparently) it's thought that the domestic raspberry originated in Turkey. As Maria loves to tell me, raspberries are not actually a berry (a fruit with seeds scattered throughout the pulp) but an aggregate fruit made up of drupelets (sections of fruit, each with one seed).

The kind of big juicy raspberries seen in Grantebridge didn't exist until a lot more recently thanks to hybridisation & selection (sorry, Eivor!) Golden raspberries are a real thing though - not common in the UK, but found throughout AC Valhalla's version England.

Ravensthorpe has its own Roman empire fanboy in the form of Octavian, aka Osbert of Lunden. (It's impossible to get a pic of him looking anything but a biiit creepy, so sorry about that.) Anyway, his main issue with the house Eivor gets built for him is that it "lacks the grandeur of the empire at its peak." Rude, frankly. So I couldn't resist having Eivor reference his gripes about Ravensthorpe.

You can also find raspberries at the monastery in Grantebridgescire, and Gratian's villa ruins to keep up with the Roman theme.

I'm already working on the next page to finish up Grantebridgescire. It's going to be wildflowers from the cursed zone on the hill.

[botanizing]

Rubus idaeus (Rosaceae)

raspberry

Edmonton River Valley | Sept. 19, 2020

[jimmy-ds-trees]

Rubus Idaeus

Raspberries

Rubus Idaeus

Tree or Plant Type: Shrub

Foliage: Deciduous (seasonally loses leaves, but comes back yearly)

Native Locale: Europe

Landscape Uses: decorative, for food

Mature Height: 3-6 feet

Mature Width: 2-3 feet

Light Exposure: medium sun, does good in under story.

Hardiness Zones:  Zone 3-9

BUILD/BEAUTY

The common raspberry is a common sight in New England Forests. This is a highly edible berry that as a child growing up in these woods I would eat as a snack often. These woods are filled with these berries because the farm that is adjacent to this wooded area used to cultivate blackberries and raspberries. This is a plant that I would place in a landscape, as the benefit of the sweet berries is just that good. This gets a 1 for its thorny stalk, a 4 for its berries, and a 2 for its landscape uniqueness.

Bark: (1-3) 1

Leaves: (1-4) 4

Landscape uniqueness: (1-3) 2

Total: 6

The building properties of a berry bush are nonexistent, so the score this plant gets is a 0 out of 10. 

Source:

1. https://veggieharvest.com/vegetables/raspberry.html

2. https://www.botanical-online.com/en/botany/raspberry

3. https://www.friendsofthewildflowergarden.org/pages/plants/wildredraspberry.html

[ozdemirmuhendislik]

Rubus idaeus. Türlü yararı var ama daha önemlisi lezzetli 😋#botany (Küre, Kastamonu)

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