Highbush blueberry, wild kind

I'll start here: this is Vaccinium corymbosum, the wild progenitor of cultivated highbush blueberry. I work on the multiple direct and indirect interactions between cultivated blueberry, ericoid mycorrhizal fungi and pollinating bees, but I think it's instructive to visit native populations of the plant occasionally to see how these interactions progress in the wild. And to pick the fruit!

Blueberry is an interesting crop because efforts to domesticate the plant began only about 75 years ago. This is in contrast to the long periods of artificial selection most of our food plants have undergone.

Here's a recent news piece on the domestication of highbush blueberry.

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