Rubus idaeus Paris - Raspberry

The Paris Raspberry is a perpetual variety that produces large, conical, excellent tasting red fruits. It forms a beautiful, upright, sucker-producing plant and bears fruit over a long period, from mid-June to mid-October.

The Paris 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 mountain ash, especially in wooded mountainous areas, but also in lowlands. It is a deciduous bush with upright stems, forming a bush of about 1.50m (4.9ft) in all directions over time. The stems are biennial, each one dying after fruiting. It spreads from a perennial sucker-producing stump, which produces new shoots armed with small prickles every year. It has leaves which are green on the upper side, white-green and downy on the underside. The flowering is very nectar-rich. 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 formed by small agglomerated drupes, not adhering to the receptacle*, detaching very easily when ripe. The fruiting is abundant from mid-June to mid-October, with a slight pause in the middle of summer.

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

The Paris Raspberry 'Paris' can be associated with non-perpetual varieties like 'Malling Promise' to obtain 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 end of the Middle Ages. In the forest, five to ten years after a specific beech was cut, wild raspberries would appear in the cleared area and produce fruit for three to four years. Raspberries are not very caloricic; 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 broader sense and blackberries (including Rubus fruticosus, our European blackberry), which retain the receptacle on the fruit.