Empetrum nigrum

Crowberry ( Empetrum nigrum)

The crowberry ( Empetrum nigrum) is an evergreen dwarf shrub with edible black berries. Location of the crowberry are sandy heaths, moors heaths, raised bog margins. This species is very rare in the Alps, they will be represented by the hermaphrodite crowberry ( Empetrum hermaphroditum ). The species has a circumpolar distribution. The name is derived from the digestion spread by crows.

Description

The crowberry is a low -lying evergreen, carpet -forming dwarf upsetting and Wurzelkriecher, which is up to 50 cm high. The individual shrubs can be over 80 years old. The needle-like leaves are rinnigen to 6 mm long and 2 mm wide and are rolled over on the leaf margin, so that the located on the underside of leaves stomata are available only through a narrow gap with the outside air. What probably an adaptation to the mineral salt poverty of the soil is as an adaptation to the drought. The plant forms a mycorrhiza from the Ericaceae type.

The flowers are mostly dioecious nectar-rich " disk flowers ". The color of the rather inconspicuous flowers is in the male and in the female pale pink purple. These are created already in late summer for the next year. Pollinators are bees and hoverflies; also wind pollination is possible. The flowering period is May to June. By mid- July, grow numerous black, berry-like drupes. These are subject to the digestive dissemination for example by crows.

Occurrence

The crowberry is limited in its distribution to the northern hemisphere. There she has a circumpolar distribution and preferred peaty sandy soils in extremely moist air and wintermildem climate. In Europe, the distribution area of north over Central Europe extends southward to the Pyrenees, the central part of the Apennines and to Bulgaria. In the Alps, crowberry come up before at altitudes of 2,800 m in the Bernese Oberland. In the northern Alps to the height limit is 2,200 m.

In Germany, the species occurs in the low mountain ranges Rhön, Eifel, resin Thuringian Forest and the Bavarian Forest. On the north German coastal dunes colonized on the coasts of North and Baltic Sea. In the lowlands can be found scattered nature and often forming stands on drier sites in bogs. Chance of the species is in the Harz, in the Thuringian forest, encountered in the Fichtelgebirge and other mountain ranges of the Bohemian Basin and the Black Forest.

Use

The fruits taste sour and bitter act due to their content of Andromedotoxin slightly intoxicating and dizzying.

The fruits are edible raw and cooked. The occurring in northern Europe forms with larger and aromatic tasting berries are eaten especially after frost in larger quantities. The Sami let them freeze in milk as a storage for the winter, the Eskimos eat them as a delicacy mixed with mushy battered cod liver, in Iceland, people keep them in sour milk or drinks the juice and Greenland consumed they are with seal blubber mixed. In Norway you prepare wine from them.

In folk medicine, berries were used because of their high content of vitamin C for scurvy and thanks to its tannin content for diarrhea.

Toxicity

The whole plant is slightly toxic; in the Scandinavian countries and in northern Russia, the fruits are raw and processed as edible.

Main ingredients are: ursolic acid, rutin, quercetin, ellagic acid and isoquercetin; Andromedotoxin also occurs in the plant.

Presumably, strong fluctuations of the ingredients can be observed at the local races. Honey of Empetrum species can cause gastroenteritis and cardiac complications in extreme cases.