KITSAP — I GUESS YOU MIGHT CALL THIS more of a blackberry battle, but I would like to recommend a new interactive event for the annual Blackberry Festival if anyone is willing to help work out the details. It will be an off-site event. There will be some organizing involved.
But hear me out… The Blackberry Battle!
A Blackberry Festival-sanctioned face-off between local landscaping amateurs and professionals to see who can clear their section of the blackberry bramble the quickest.
Winner gets a pie? Think about it…
I was out in the garden the other day, fighting the good fight, when I realized I can always tell summer is nearing its end when I set out for the battle royale of the season, a face off between the surging 15-foot-tall invading vine monsters rioting along the edge of the property and me trying to keep them from choking out the proper crops— or really anything in their path. They are a long-fought formidable foe in the Pacific Northwest.
And quite an impressive freak of nature.
On the advice of a long-ago neighbor, this specific bramble exists exclusively as a security barrier to keep undesirables taking shortcuts through our backyards. That’s why he let them grow, he said. The day of the battle, I was out there in dad shorts and sneakers with holes in them. Gloves with holes in them, a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, wielding a pair of cheap old shears. Nicks, cuts and blood running down my leg. That should tell you this is not a gardening column.
This is, however, a recurring gardening event in my world. It’s almost a meditative task. Albeit itchy, uncomfortable and slightly painful.
Lost in reverie while listening to death metal, chopping the vines along the fenceline and dragging their carcasses into unruly hulking piles, I imagined I was battling some autonomous plant-monster, like the ones in sci-fi novels, that was trying to drag me in and devour me slowly with its thick thorny vines… which led to this whole blackberry battle idea.
Ridiculous, I know. So too seems the idea of a town festival dedicated to an intensely aggressive invasive species that has taken over millions of acres of over the past hundred years. But here we are. Bremerton’s Blackberry Festival has been a fixture for more than three decades since its debut in 1990. Oregon’s got them too. Bremerton’s is coming up at the end of the month. Labor day weekend.
These brambles of invasive Himalayan blackberries—(Rubus armeniacus, a member of the rose family, a class C noxious weed as classified by WSU)—are both blessing and curse. In a strange way, I appreciate them. Most everyone else I know kinda hates them. Sure, it’s always nice to have a buffet of fresh ripe berries at your disposal this time of year. But it’s also a relentless and reckless totalitarian species of plant that can totally obliterate native vegetation and, left unchecked, devour acres of soil. And even swallow man-made structures.
The plant is nearly invincible. What doesn’t kill it makes it stronger. It spreads through multiple mechanisms and can reappear after years of dormancy. But, man, a handful of fresh plump berries on a hot summer day? Let alone, as many handfuls as you can eat?! And there’s gonna be pie later??!!
BLAME LUTHER BURBANK?
Luther Burbank—a 19th century botanist, inventor, businessman and aspiring evolutionary alchemist of sorts—is the man held responsible for the proliferation of the Himalayan blackberry throughout the Pacific Northwest.
The story begins with Burbank at the end of the 19th century, without any formal training, aiming to develop, breed and propagate prolific fresh produce that could withstand the trip on the new transcontinental railroad and help feed middle class families. One of his early creations later mutated into a potato known as the Russet Burbank which would go on to become the star starch in McDonald’s french fries.
Burbank also got into some weird stuff like a spineless cactus, a stoneless plum and a tomato-potato hybrid, which evidently never panned out. Word has it, he was also working on a thornless blackberry. Throughout his life he developed plants and wrote books from his home and laboratory in California. But the guy was an international celebrity, hanging with the likes of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie in his day. Frida Kahlo painted a posthumous portrait of him when he died in 1921.
He traded seeds with fellow collectors from around the world and had received one package from India which included seeds of a massive high yield blackberry variety which was particularly suited for the mild Pacific Coast region. The Himalayan Giant, he called it. Burbank offered the seeds in a special circular targeted at mild climates in 1885 and by the early 1900s, the Himalayan blackberry was thriving, especially in the Pacific Northwest.
By the 1940’s, there are indications the plant had already become a nuisance in the area. Himalayan blackberries would go on to swallow hundreds of acres of land, reportedly causing millions of dollars in damage, prevention and maintenance costs. And by 2018, a King County Noxious Weeds blog referred to their sprawl as ‘an ecological disaster.’
Sitting down after the battle with a fresh bowl of blackberries, I still feel like I won. // JAMES MUNK
2025 BLACKBERRY FESTIVAL Aug 30 thru Sept 1 in downtown Bremerton. More at blackberry festival.org. And find more on Luther Burbank’s story thru NPR, WSU and Oregon Humanities
