The Scientific Parts of a Raspberry Plant

Scientific Classification

• The raspberry is a member of the rosaceae, or rose, family. Like rose plants, raspberry plants have sturdy canes that must be pruned. There are more than 200 types of raspberries, including black, yellow, and even orange and purple varieties, as well as the more common red raspberry. They are harvested generally from late summer to first fall frost.

  Other Rubus fruits related to the raspberry are blackberries and the blackberry-raspberry hybrids such as boysenberry, youngberry and loganberry.

Types of Canes

• The canes are biennial. An early sucker is called a turion, and a cane in first-year growth is called a primocane. In the second year of growth, the canes are called floricanes, and these are the ones that flower and later produce fruit.

Raspberry Plant Parts

• The other parts of the raspberry plant are the root and root crown, the lateral canes that grow horizontally off the primocanes and floricanes, and the tips of the canes.

Leaf and Fruit

• A raspberry plant's leaves are palmate, with small serrated edges and three to five leaflets making up each leaf group. The flowers are small, white or pink, and grow in multiflowered racemes on the floricanes. The plants flower in late summer on biennial raspberry plants. Each ovary develops into a drupelet, or the familiar bump on the raspberry's exterior. The raspberry itself is an "aggregate" fruit, because each individual raspberry is made up of a group of drupelets over a central core, or torus. The drupelets are hairlike and stick together. When a raspberry is picked, the receptacle that attaches it to the plant is left behind, leaving a hole at the end of the fruit.

  Fruit develops in 30 to 50 days, and most varieties of raspberries are self-pollinating. However, bee pollination does improve the quality of the fruit.