Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The genus name is the classical Latin word for a prickly scrambling shrub, and it is usually traced back to the Latin for red. Its five separate petals and its many {stamens} all sit on the rim of a shallow cup formed by the flower base, with the seed-forming parts standing free inside that cup, and every leaf stalk carries a pair of narrow appendages fused to its base. The species epithet points to Mount Ida, the peak near ancient Troy where Greek writers said the plant grew wild. Its shoots live exactly two years: a stem rises in one season and flowers in none, bears in the next, and then dies outright while the perennial root pushes up replacements. Its fruit is not one berry but a cluster of many small stone fruits packed around a central core, and the whole cluster lifts off that core when ripe, leaving a hollow thimble in the hand and a small white cone on the stem. Its wild range circles the northern hemisphere in two subspecies, one across Europe and northern Asia and one across northern North America, always in clearings, burnt ground and woodland edges. The leaves are cut into three to five toothed {leaflets}, each 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 cm) long and silvery-white and felted underneath, so a gust through a thicket turns the whole stand pale. Its seed survives decades buried in forest soil, so a stand erupts on ground that has just been logged or burnt, and archaeologists routinely pull the pips out of old settlement layers. Its dried leaves have been brewed as a herbal tea taken in the last weeks of pregnancy in European folk practice, a use quite separate from the fruit. Grown commercially on rows of canes tied to wires, its soft red summer fruit fills supermarket punnets and the standard jam jar, and the picked fruit is famously hollow where it pulled off its core.

Accepted Answer

Rubus idaeus

Name That Plant #052