Yesterday I got a great tip to go and find the "black huckleberries" at Camosun Bog. I had never been to Camosun bog but it wasn't too hard to find. it is just off 16th near crown. I biked there from UBC. It's beautiful and they are doing a remediation project there which you can help out with if you have time on Saturday mornings from 9am to noon.
I wasn't exaclty sure what I was looking for, my friend had said that the berries looked like the red huckle berries, but they were dark blue and grew above the leaves rather than hanging below them. Much to my delight, once I got onto the boardwalk they were hard to miss, and upon tasting them I was brought back to my childhood. I remember picking them in the summers when we would rent a cabin at Still Water near Powell River. My mum would get hours of time to herself by asking my brother and I to go and pick enough huckleberries for a pie. Huckleberries, for the unninitiated, are tiny, and I don't know if we ever actually managed to collect a pie's worth, but all the same everybody won.
It has been years since I have seen these and they are delicious! I was pleased to run into other people who were noticing the berries. One grandmother was encouraging her grandson to try the berries, another couple were noticing the berries and thought I was "brave" for trying them but were too skeptical to try them themselves. Made me a bit sad, as this is a trait I have noticed in a lot of people, a sort of poison phobia that seems to extend to all plants or mushrooms not wrapped in plastic and sold by the pound. Le sigh. At any rate the berries are there for the taking and I would encourage everyone to go and have a taste, there are plenty of red huckleberries as well and some salmon berries to boot. When I got home I looked them up and found a great website which had the botanical name and description, turns out they are actually called Alaska Blueberries, but both terms work fine as far as I'm concerned.
