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Vaccinium myrtillus
Also called Bilberry, Blaeberry, Dwarf Bilberry, Myrtle Blueberry, Myrtle Whortleberry, European Blueberry, Dwarf Whortleberry
Vaccinium myrtillus is a small deciduous shrub, usually 10 to 50 cm tall, that spreads by rhizomes into dense patches and bears edible blue berries. It grows best in cool, acidic, moist soils in open woodland, heath and moorland.
Vaccinium myrtillus is a holarctic species of shrub with edible fruit of blue color, known by the common names bilberry, blaeberry, and whortleberry. It is more precisely called common bilberry or blue whortleberry to distinguish it from other Vaccinium relatives.
Vaccinium myrtillus is a Holarctic species native to almost every country in Europe, north and central Asia, Japan, Greenland, Western Canada, and the Western United States. Within Europe it is only absent from Sardinia, Sicily, the European portion of Turkey, Crete, the Aegean Islands, Cyprus, Crimea, and southern European Russia. It occurs in the acidic soils of heaths, boggy barrens, moorlands, degraded meadows, open forests at the base of pine and mountain spruce forests, and parklands, slopes, and moraines at elevations up to 2,350 m (7,710 ft).
Lowbush blueberry · Farkleberry · Northern blueberry · Sea bilberry · New Jersey blueberry · Dwarf bilberry · Highbush blueberry · Creeping blueberry · Azorean Bilberry · Darrow's blueberry · Elliott's blueberry · Southern mountain cranberry
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Vaccinium myrtillus by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
