Eastern Wild Gooseberry
Among the mountains from Massachusetts to North Carolina, the eastern wild gooseberry grows. It is said that its flavor is delicious. The fruit is purplish in color and is free from all prickles. It grows on slender stems and, like the cultivated gooseberry, is tipped with the dry calyx. The leaves are small, rather round, and have three or five lobes. The flowers are greenish and insignificant. The plant is three or four feet high, with spreading branches and smooth stems.
Good food on the trail.
Dwarf Blueberry
Perhaps the most satisfactory of all berries when one is really hungry is the blueberry, of which there are several varieties. The dwarf blueberry is probably the most common. It is the earliest of the blueberries to ripen and grows in the thin, sandy, and rocky soil which is spurned by most other plants. You will find it upon barren hillsides, in rocky fields, and in dry pine woods. The berries are round, blue, about the size of peas, and are covered with bloom like the grape. They grow in thick clusters at the end of the branch and are tipped with fine calyx teeth. The seeds are so small as to be almost unnoticed and the soft ripe berry will bruise easily.
The flavor of all blueberries has a nutty quality which seems to give the berry more substance as a food. The leaf is rather narrow and pointed at each end; the under side is a lighter green than the upper and both are glossy. In the fall the leaves turn red and drop easily. The bush is low and the branches usually covered with small, white dots.
Low Blueberry
Another variety is called the low blueberry. It is very much like the dwarf blueberry, but the bush grows sometimes as high as four feet. It is stiff and upstanding and prefers the edge of the woods and sheltered roadsides to the dry open fields. The berries are blue with a grape-like bloom and, like the first variety, grow in thick clusters at the end of the branch. You can grab a good handful in passing, so many are there in a bunch.