Talking Southern – Blackberry Winter

So it is springtime – or sprangtime, as we mentioned in an earlier column – and we  anxiously await, or else dread, the official arrival of summer and its blue-blazing heat on June 20,^, 2025.   But often around this time of year in the southeast, there comes a cooler spell, lasting perhaps a week, that can threaten newly blooming plants with rime much later than when old Jack Frost usually makes his rounds.

     We call this mini-cold-blast, “Blackberry Winter.”  That’s a regional term not often heard anymore, which your compiler thinks is a shame.   Anybody can talk about a cold snap, but “Blackberry Winter” has a romance, or a mystique (or a something) about it that lifts the shivery season from the ho-hum to the special.

     Lots of folks do not pick blackberries anymore, but once upon a time they were valued for their lush flavor and wide availability.  Free food was a rare enough thing, and foods like blackberries and wild plums were often picked for jams, jellies, cobblers, and other treats.  In fact, your compiler remembers the large clump of wild plums that once grew in the right-of-way at the northeast corner  of the Highway 74 – Highway 54 intersection in Peachtree City, when three quadrants of that intersection were still undeveloped, back in the long-ago days of the 1960s.  

     His mother would pull her white 1965 Dodge Polara off the road and she and her children would get out and pick wild plums, filling up the cheap slatted wooden baskets she had gotten at the state farmers’ market.  Your compiler still remembers the delicious taste of the jelly she would make from those plums, and he remembers that every time he drives through the now-bustling intersection where once, long ago, wild plums flourished.

    What all that has to do with Blackberry Winter is that the cold spell the colorful term refers to often has a direct bearing on the wild plum and blackberry crops each year and can mean the difference in abundant treats and meager ones.  Frostbite on blackberry and wild plum blooms causes serious curtailment to eventual yields, and it must have happened so often it got named, “Blackberry Winter” somewhere along the way.  

     Why it was not named, “Wild Plum Winter,” your compiler does not know, but he recalls that his great aunt, who lived in Fayetteville from birth in 1921 till death in 2017, referred to it as “Chinquapin Winter.”  That term surprised him, for he does not recall having chinquapin, or chestnut, trees in the area, but that is probably because the national blight had taken almost all of them out by the time his memories began.  

     He asked her about it the first time he heard her mention it, and she said, “I don’t really know.  That’s just what Grandma Hill always called it.”   Her Grandma Hill, who lived from 1855 to 1936 and whose father had died in the Seven Days Battles of the Peninsula Campaign in 1862, actually witnessed a Confederate-Yankee skirmish in the front yard of her childhood home in Clayton County in August 1864, after which she, her widowed mother, and siblings subsisted that fall and winter on eggs from the hen they hid under a bed when the Yankees searched their house, on wild plums, watercress, and dried apples from the few trees left in the family orchard after the skirmish.  Someone once said that a crow flying over Georgia after Sherman’s march would have had to carry its on rations, so they probably relied on chinquapins and whatever other nuts and small game they could scrounge up, as well.  

    So whether you call it a cold snap, Blackberry Winter, or even Chinquapin Winter, you probably notice a cool period in late April or early May nearly every year.  And now you know it has a proper name – or two.