A Love Letter to Blackberries

Glossy, purplish-black, bejeweled

Mar 25, 2025

Good morning!

Here is a love letter to blackberries — a result of feeling stretched too thin this month and, in turn, getting moony about late summer days in all their long, lazy glory. Let’s forget this cloudy Tuesday and pretend we’re eating sun-kissed blackberries straight from the bramble in August instead.

On Blackberries

Blackberries gathered by my dad / A blackberry illustration by me

American black bears are beautiful creatures, with dark, shaggy fur, long, sloping snouts, and large, leathery paws. Guarded and shy, they tend to avoid humans, preferring their quiet, forested lives to cross-species socializing (or terrorizing, for that matter). And so I consider myself lucky to have seen a black bear — more than once — lumbering up the steep, sleepy road leading to my family’s home in Vermont.

Both times I spotted a black bear, it was summer, when Vermont is at its greenest and lushest. Summer is when black bears begin to feast, fattening themselves to survive the long winter hibernation ahead. When we humans are told it’s swimsuit season, bears are told it’s growing season. When we humans are told to shrink ourselves to fit into squeaky scraps of nylon, bears are told to fill their omnivorous stomachs with all the sustenance they can find. Growing bigger, plusher, and heavier in advance of hibernation is how bears survive, and they’ll eat almost anything to get there — grasses, carrion, insects, nuts, small mammals, and, most charmingly, berries.

Since their fur protects them from the prickly bushes, bears can — and do — walk straight into berry brambles, snout-first. Using their paws to hold and move the branches as needed, they pluck the berries with their mouths and swallow them whole, as eager and ravenous as children with melting ice cream cones. (It’s worth a YouTube search to admire their technique.)

There’s a blackberry bramble along our road in Vermont, and I like to imagine a black bear stumbling upon it with the same glee as a kid hearing the jingle of an ice cream truck. Think of Winnie the Pooh — even bears crave something sweet.

There’s something primal to the way humans discover and consume berries, too, braving scratches and stains for a taste of something wild and sweet. Finding a bramble heavy with fruit is a triumph — and well worth emerging thorn-scratched, fingertips dyed ink-black. Blackberries I find particularly worthy of battle wounds: glossy and purplish-black, with a bejeweled coat, each bead seeming its own distinct berry.

On my first full day at Ballymaloe Cookery School, the school’s co-founder, Darina Allen, took my cohort out to pick wild blackberries. There were too many of us and not enough blackberries, but we were all too entranced with our new reality to care. Suddenly, “class” entailed picking wild blackberries in the Irish countryside, led around by the effusive Darina in linen pants and pigtails. Gone were the days of sitting behind a computer screen, staring blankly at Zoom, willing our eyes to stay open.

I don’t remember what we made with the blackberries, or if we even gathered enough to make anything, but if we did, it was probably paired with sweet geranium — a flowering plant with lemon-scented leaves that have a rosy, delicate taste. Blackberry and sweet geranium is a classic Ballymaloe pairing and a very sophisticated duo, I think. Rory O’Connell, Darina’s brother and fellow co-founder, has a recipe for blackberry and sweet geranium posset, and JR Ryall, pastry chef at Ballymaloe House, has one for wild blackberry and sweet geranium sorbet — both desserts sweet, tart, floral, and best served with some sort of crisp, buttery biscuit. Ballymaloe recipes excel at taking something wild and transforming it into something so dignified you could serve it to royalty for tea.

The way I like to serve blackberries is somewhere between a bear and Ballymaloe. I want them wild, straight from the bramble, but maybe with a bit of sugar and lemon, and maybe some cream, too — cold and liquid or softly whipped. And the way I like to eat blackberries is more like a bear: inhaled, as if I’d never tasted them before and was only now realizing how tart and sweet and delicious they are.