The Benefits of Blueberries II
There are three or four species of cranberry, classified in two sections:
* Oxycoccus or Oxycoccus Vaccinium palustris (Common Cranberry or Northern Cranberry). It is found throughout the Northern Hemisphere cold area, including northern Europe, northern Asia and North America.
The leaves are small, between 5 and 10 mm. The leaves are dark pink with a purple central spike, and grow on stems finely hairy. The fruit is a small pale pink berry, with a refreshing sharp taste sour.
* Vaccinium microcarpum or Oxycoccus microcarpus (small cranberry), which occurs in northern Europe and northern Asia, and differs in that the leaves are more triangular, and flower stems are hairless. Some botanists include it in V. oxycoccus.
* Vaccinium macrocarpon or Oxycoccus macrocarpus (American Cranberry) native to northern North America (eastern Canada and eastern United States, south of North Carolina at high altitudes). It differs from V. oxycoccus in the leaves are larger, between 10 and 20 mm in length, and taste slightly similar to the block.
* Vaccinium erythrocarpum or Oxycoccus erythrocarpus (mountain cranberry south), is native to southeastern North America at high altitudes in the southern Appalachian Mountains, and also in East Asia.
Cranberries may be a victim of false flower, a disease harmful but controllable phytoplasma that is common in production areas of Massachusetts and New Jersey.
The cranberry has been part of the diet of Arctic peoples for millennia, and remains a very popular fruit in Scandinavia and Russia. In Scotland the berries were harvested in wild shrubs, but the loss of suitable habitat has become so scarce plants no longer does.
In eastern North America, Native Americans used the fruits of Vaccinium macrocarpon as food is one of the main ingredients of survival food called pemmican. It is known that they are taught the starving English settlers in Massachusetts around 1620, so the cranberry was added to the traditional celebration of Thanksgiving Day.
It is also a typical crop of the Friesian island of Terschelling, where he arrived in the nineteenth century: a barrel (the rest of a Shipwreck) loaded with fruit arrived at the coast where, they say, was opened by the inhabitants of the island.
They, finding nothing of value in the barrel, the fruits yielded by land. But cranberry found suitable habitat and now plentiful on the island, where they make liqueurs, jams and many other products with it.