It’s late but here is today’s post. At lunch time my friends Bryan, Steve, Paul and I went walking along Lake Washington’s western shoreline (Lake Washington is in the metro area of Seattle, separating the cities of Seattle and Bellevue, and Redmond where the Microsoft campus is). The picture shows a platform that is used for hanging out and jumping into the water in summer.
The thimbleberry picture comes from right there next to the lake; I never knew there was such a thing, and I ate one today. The shrub is 2.5m tall and has no prickles – very nice for animals and humans foraging for berries – and it produces a tart edible composite fruit around a centimeter in diameter, which ripen to a bright red in mid to late summer. Like other raspberries it is not a true berry, but instead an aggregate fruit of numerous drupelets around a central core. The drupelets may be carefully removed separately from the core when picked, leaving a hollow fruit which bears a resemblance to a thimble, perhaps giving the plant its name.
