Description:

• Shrubs, rarely herbs, mostly scrambling with ± arching sterile shoots, carrying ± erect flowering branches, armed with prickles and various amounts of hair and stalked glands
• Leaves alternate, simple or compound, lobed, 3-5-foliolate, pinnate or digitate; leaflets with serrated margins, glabrous or densely hairy, petiolate; stipules filiform, linear or obovate, free or adnate to base of petiole
• Inflorescences terminal or axillary, panicles or corymbs, rarely flowers solitary; bracteoles 0
• Flowers bisexual, slightly perigynous
• Calyx: tube (receptacle) broad; lobes 5, equal, longer than calyx tube, persistent
• Petals 5, alternating with sepals, inserted on margins of perigynous cup, sometimes 0, white, pink or red
• Stamens many, rarely definite, inserted in mouth of calyx tube
• Disc lining tube of receptacle
• Gynoecium of many carpels inserted on a spongy elongate receptacle, developing into drupelets; ovules 2 in each carpel (1 often subaborted), collateral, pendulous; style subterminal, filiform; stigma simple or capitate
• Fruit an aggregation of 1-seeded, succulent drupelets crowded upon a dry or spongy, conical, enlarged, sweet and edible receptacle
• Seed ovoid-globose, pendulous; testa thin
• x = 7 (high polyploidy)

Nomenclature:

• Rubus L.
  • Linnaeus: 492 (1753)
  • Linnaeus: 218 (1754)
  • Jussieu: 338 (1789)
  • Kunth: 219 (1823)
  • Candolle: 556 (1825)
  • Endlicher: 1241 (1840)
  • Harvey: 286 (1862)
  • Hooker: 616 (1865)
  • Gustafsson: 177 (1938)
  • Levyns: 430 (1950)
  • Graham: 21 (1960)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 168 (1966)
  • Heslop-Harrison: 7 (1968)
  • Kupicha: 12 (1978)
  • Hedberg: 573 (1986)
  • Hedberg: 31 (1989)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 250, mainly cooler areas of the northern hemisphere
• Southern Africa: Species 17, some introduced and naturalised, Botswana, Northern Province, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Swaziland, Free State, KwaZulu-Natal, Lesotho, Western and Eastern Cape
  • All fruits are edible