Northern blueberry, sweet hurts, bleuet boréal

Plants forming small, dense colonies, 0.1-0.9 dm, (super-ficially rhizomatous); twigs green, (delicate), angled, (intri-cately branched), hairy in lines. Leaves deciduous; blade bright green, narrowly elliptic, 8-21 × 2-6 mm, membranous, margins sharply, uniformly serrate, surfaces usually glabrous, eglandular abaxially. Flowers: calyx green, glaucous, glabrous (sometimes ciliate); corolla white to greenish white, cylindric, 3-4 mm; filaments ciliate. Berries blue, glaucous, 3-5 mm diam., glabrous. Seeds 10-30, ca. 1.1 mm. 2n = 24.

Flowering late spring-early summer. Headlands, open, rocky uplands, alpine heaths and meadows, forest-tundra. 0-2000 m; N.B., Nfld. and Labr., N.S., Que.; Maine, N.H., N.Y., Vt.

SELECTED REFERENCE Vander Kloet, S. P. 1977. The taxonomic status of Vaccinium boreale. Canad. J. Bot. 55: 281-288.