Rubus idaeus Versailles - Raspberry

The Versailles Raspberry is a perpetual variety that produces very large light red fruits (10 - 12g), conical in shape, highly aromatic and of excellent quality. Its firm fruits have a good shelf life and can be stored for a long time.

It forms a beautiful upright sucker-producing plant, with thornless canes, which makes harvesting easier. Early to fruit, it produces berries over a long period, from early June to October.

The Versailles Raspberry belongs to the Rosaceae family. It is a cousin of blackberries and wild roses. The wild raspberry is native to Europe and temperate Asia, where it grows in cool climates alongside elderberry, beech, or rowan, especially in mountainous undergrowth, but also in plains. It is a deciduous shrub with upright stems, forming a bush 1.50m (4.9ft) in all directions over time. The stems are biennial, each dying after fruiting. It spreads from a perennial sucker-producing stump, producing new stems armed with small prickles every year. Its leaves are green on the top, white-green and downy on the underside. The flowering is highly attractive to bees. The white flowers are small (1 to 2cm (0.8in) in diameter), grouped in small clusters of 10 to 12, and appear in two waves: in April - May and then in July - August. The fruits are made up of small clustered drupes, not adhering to the receptacle*, detaching very easily when ripe. The fruiting is abundant and starts in June and lasts until mid-October, with a slight pause in the middle of summer.

The fruits are best consumed fresh, as they do not keep well and should be consumed or quickly transformed into jam, for example. Production reaches its peak in the third year after planting. One plant can produce fruit for around 10 years.

The Versailles Raspberry can be combined with non-perpetual varieties such as 'Glen Ample' to achieve a continuous harvest throughout the summer.

The fruits can be used to make jams or fill tarts. The cultivation of raspberries seems to date back to the late Middle Ages. In the forest, five to ten years after a particularly beech cutting, wild raspberries appear in the cleared area, producing fruit for three to four years. Raspberries are not very calorific, they contain two specific sugars, levulose and fructose, and very little sucrose. The fruits also contain ellagic acid, tannins, vitamin C, and are a good source of potassium. It is also a medicinal plant, with its young shoots and buds used in gemmotherapy.

*This non-adherence is indeed a distinguishing criterion between raspberries in the broad sense and blackberries (including Rubus fruticosus, our European blackberry) where the receptacle remains on the fruit.