I’ve been at my house for the better part of a year and I’m happily finding I have many volunteers of the Rubus genus which seem to be doing well and are shooting out runners every which way. Almost all have yet to celebrate their first birthday and so are too young to bear fruit but this one predates my arrival and did start working on… this weird thing.

I thought this was a Southern Dewberry (Rubus trivialis). There is a field with like jillions of Southern Dewberries nearby and their fruits which started coming in earlier look very very similar to blackberries by my eyes with many tiny drupelets densely packed together and either black color if they’re ripe or green/red if not. However, this berry looks very different since it only has two comparatively huge drupelets. There are other flowers on this particular bramble but only one other on this one made fruit (that less mature fruit also has only two drupelets).

Is this like some kind of mutant? Or is that variation in fruiting not unheard of for this or similar plants? Just wondering since I’ve not yet seen any similar looking fruit out in that field even though they’re all over the place. For less exotic possible causes I can think of, we have had a massive drought that only lately broke so maybe it’s a resource thing (though that should also be the case for the field which is not irrigated?) or maybe pollination went badly since this particular fella is kind of isolated without many floricanes of fellow Rubus nearby.

I also have what I think is an immature Pennsylvania Blackberry (Rubus pennsylvanicus) without flowers on my property and saw some Sand Dewberry (Rubus cuneifolius) out in the field and who knows what I haven’t seen so maybe there could be hybrid shenanigans? But both of those also have fruit that look way more like a standard blackberry than this weird thing so I suspect not.

Bonus picture since I think I failed to make multipictures at the top: