Vaccinium boreale, common name northern blueberry, sweet hurts, or bleuet boréal (in French), is a plant species native to North America.
Description Vaccinium boreale is a lowbush blueberry, forming a small shrub up to tall, in dense colonies of many individuals. The twigs are green, angled, with lines of hairs. The leaves are deciduous, narrowly elliptic, and up to long, with teeth along the margins.
The flowers are white, up to long. The berries are blue, up to 5 mm across.Hall, Ivan Victor, & Aalders, Lewis Eldon. 1961. American Journal of Botany 48(3): 200–201, f. 1 [map].Trehane, J. 2004. Blueberries, Cranberries, and Other Vacciniums. Portland, Maine.Gleason, H. A. & A.J. Cronquist. 1991. Manual of the Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada (ed. 2) i–910. New York Botanical Garden, Bronx. The cytology is 2n = 24.
Distribution and habitat The species is native to the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. It has been found in Québec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York State. It grows in tundra (arctic or alpine), rocky uplands, and in open conifer forests at elevations up to .Vander Kloet, S. P. 1977. The taxonomic status of Vaccinium boreale. Canadian Journal of Botany 55: 281-288.Vander Kloet, S. P. 1988. The Genus Vaccinium in North America. Ottawa. Agriculture Canada, Research Branch, Publication number 1828.
Cultivation Lowbush blueberries, sometimes called "wild blueberries", are generally not planted by farmers, but rather are cultivated and picked wild on berry fields called "barrens".
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