The dewberry is a small, dark, aggregate bramble fruit of trailing Rubus species, the earlier and smaller wild cousin of the upright blackberry. Ripening from late spring into early summer — weeks ahead of the blackberry — it grows on slender, ground-hugging canes rather than tall thickets, and its purple-black drupelets, often dusted with a pale waxy bloom, carry a sweet-tart, winey blackberry flavour prized in the foraging traditions of the American South and of Europe.