May Appeal 2026
Please help keep TSO growing!
IDS Trees and Shrubs Online has become a fundamental source of reliable information about cultivated woody plants, freely available to everyone, everywhere. We hope you find it useful.
For the first time we are asking our users if you could support us.
If everyone who uses TSO during May 2026 gives just £10, we would cover our costs for a whole year, enabling us to accelerate our work.
Vaccinium uliginosum
Credits
Article from Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles
Recommended citation
'Vaccinium uliginosum' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Common Names
- Bog Bilberry
Other taxa in genus
- Vaccinium angustifolium
- Vaccinium arboreum
- Vaccinium arctostaphylos
- Vaccinium bracteatum
- Vaccinium caespitosum
- Vaccinium canadense
- Vaccinium corymbosum
- Vaccinium crassifolium
- Vaccinium cylindraceum
- Vaccinium delavayi
- Vaccinium duclouxii
- Vaccinium dunalianum
- Vaccinium erythrocarpum
- Vaccinium floribundum
- Vaccinium fragile
- Vaccinium glauco-album
- Vaccinium hirsutum
- Vaccinium × intermedium
- Vaccinium japonicum
- Vaccinium macrocarpon
- Vaccinium membranaceum
- Vaccinium microcarpum
- Vaccinium moupinense
- Vaccinium myrsinites
- Vaccinium myrtillus
- Vaccinium nummularia
- Vaccinium oldhamii
- Vaccinium ovalifolium
- Vaccinium ovatum
- Vaccinium oxycoccos
- Vaccinium padifolium
- Vaccinium parvifolium
- Vaccinium praestans
- Vaccinium stamineum
- Vaccinium urceolatum
- Vaccinium vacillans
- Vaccinium virgatum
- Vaccinium vitis-idaea
A deciduous shrub, 1 to 2 ft high, with very minutely downy or glabrous round branchlets. Leaves obovate, or almost round, not toothed, glabrous or finely downy beneath, dull glaucous green, 1⁄2 to 1 in. long, with scarcely any stalk. Flowers produced during May singly or in pairs or threes from the uppermost joints of the previous year’s wood, each on a drooping stalk about 1⁄4 in. long. Corolla pale red or white, bell-shaped, 1⁄6 in. long, with usually four teeth. Berries black with a blue bloom, sweet.
Native of the mountain heaths and bogs of the Northern Hemisphere and common in the north of Britain. The fruit is edible, but is said to produce headache and giddiness if eaten in quantity. It furnishes a valuable food for mountain game, but is scarcely worth cultivating in gardens. From its companion deciduous species in Britain (V. myrtillus), it is easily distinguished by its round stems, entire leaves, and in the parts of the flower being mostly in fours.
