Bilberries are one of the best herbs for the eyes and eyesight. They also strengthen the veins and capillaries, so are used for fragile and varicose veins.
The leaves are healing too, being effective for urinary tract infections and helping to regulate blood sugar levels.
Ericaceae Heather family
Description: A short deciduous shrub with green twigs, pink flowers and bluish-black berries.
Habitat: Heathland, moors and woods with acid soils.
Distribution: Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the north-west and south of England. Circumboreal, across northern Europe, northern Asia, and in western North America.
Related species: Bog bilberry (V. uliginosum) is taller and mainly found in Scotland. The North American blueberry (V. corymbosum) is very similar and is naturalised in Dorset.
Parts used: Berries and leaves picked in summer.
Bilberry is a plant of heath and moor, and woods with acid soils. It is an ancient source of food and medicine in the more upland areas of the British Isles but is found only locally in the east and south. Its long period of use is reflected in colourful regional names: bilberry in northern England, blaeberry or blueberry in Scotland, wimberry in Shropshire, whortleberry in south-eastern England and huckleberry in the Midlands (and later exported to America).
These are wild-growing bilberries, but there is an increasing cultivated acreage of the related and larger, but less tasty, American blueberry (V. corymbosum) in Dorset, Suffolk and other places.
Bilberry is not wild-harvested as a local cottage industry as much as formerly. Gathering bilberries in high summer was once a regular family and social occasion in its growing areas. The main food harvest, usually grain or potatoes, was about to begin, but the timing of early August was just right for a day celebrating bilberries.
Whether Fraughan Sunday in Ireland (from Gaelic for ‘that which grows in the heather’), whort or hurt day in southern England, Laa Luanya in the Isle of Man, and equivalent August picking days in Wales, Scotland and the south-west, the pattern was similar.
Whole communities would visit hill tops, woods, lakes or holy wells, and the more assiduous would pick bilberries in rush or willow baskets. This was a rare day out, and it was a noisy, happy and often drunken occasion. It had predictable consequences, with unmarried boys and girls, off the leash for once, taking the chance to slip away and have more personal kinds of fun.
In Yorkshire, there was a more sober bilberry connection, with bilberry pies the traditional fare of funeral teas: berries mixed with sugar and lemon juice were baked in crusty pastry. Bilberry pies were known there as ‘mucky-mouth pies’ because they stained your hands and mouth blue, though still deliciously worth the trouble.
Bilberry is a wild plant, rarely cultivated, and you must gather it for yourself if you want it. Picking bilberries takes the present-day forager as close to being a hunter-gatherer as one can get. For our ancestors, the harvest was more than recreational, it was an important source of nutrition.
Picking the berries is the perfect excuse to get out into wild nature, as bilberry grows on windswept moors or in heathy woodland. You have to get down to it on all fours to gather, especially on the moors where the plants are very low-growing.
Harvesting the low-lying fruit was and is backaching work, but bilberries are so intensely flavourful and so loaded with nutritional benefits that it is still worth the effort today. Where commercial gathering was undertaken, as in Gwent, the process was sometimes eased by a toothed metal comb or rake, the peigne, named from a French tool, which could remove the berries from their stems. The fruit would be sold via dealers to jam-making factories, and sometimes for dyeing.
The dealers were reported as being annoyed in 1917 and 1918 when the bilberry crop was requisitioned for wartime dyeing needs and they made less on the deal than with the usual jam.
Anthocyanins
These are a class of flavonoid compounds, found in high levels in bilberries.
Anthocyanins are pigments that give red or blue colour to blackberries, elderberries, hawthorn berries, cherries and many other fruits and vegetables.
These compounds are powerful antioxidants that are attracting a lot of attention in nutritional research.
Their potential health benefits include easing the effects of ageing, reducing inflammation and increasing insulin production.
Anthocyanins also protect the blood vessels and have a range of anti-cancer effects.
The berries made more than jam, going into wine and liqueurs in Scotland and on the Continent. As well as a purple dye, in medieval times the bilberry was also tried as a writing ink and paint. Sources of purply-blue paint became increasingly important in the Middle Ages as colouring in depictions of the Virgin Mary’s gown.
Bilberries have always been found nutritious and safe to eat fresh; also they are not spiny and only have small internal pips. They are equally good dried for later use in the home or while travelling. However, they are so delicious eaten straight off the bush or fresh with a little cream that you may never have any left to preserve.
Bilberries have remained a favourite for their sweet, deep-toned and slightly astringent flavour in pies, jams and syrups. Commercial jam-makers appreciated them because they have fewer seeds than most other soft fruits and also more pectin. This meant that less sugar was needed to set them, one kilogram of sugar setting two kilos of fruit (other fruit recipes usually specify about equal amounts of fruit and sugar). No wonder bilberry made a cheap and popular jam, one also rich in vitamins C and A, and healthier because it had less sugar.
Use bilberry for…
There’s an interesting story about bilberry jam that neatly links its commercial and medicinal uses. Back in the early days of the Second World War, British pilots going on night missions chanced on the fact that eating bilberry jam sandwiches before flying would improve their nightsight. This all might seem ‘jolly prang’ apocryphal, but research has confirmed that taking bilberry stimulates production of retinal purple, known to be integral to night vision.
The berry’s eyesight benefits are now recognised as also including treatment of glaucoma, cataract and general eye fatigue. Bilberry seems to work by its tonic effect on the small blood vessels of the eye, thereby improving the microcirculation.
So taking bilberry as a tea, syrup, wine, dried fruit and yes, a jam, is officially good for eyes as well as your taste buds!
This is a relatively new feature of bilberry’s repertoire. Mrs Grieve, the modern standard among British herbals, published in 1931, doesn’t mention taking bilberry for eyesight. But, as you come to expect from reading Mrs Grieve, she is thorough on historical uses.
So she mentions that the berries, being diuretic, antibacterial and disinfectant, as well as mildly astringent, are an old remedy for diarrhoea, dysentery, gastroenteritis and the like. A bilberry syrup was traditionally made in Scotland for diarrhoea. Eating a handful of the dried berries works well too.
The berry tea was used for treating bedwetting in children, and to dilate blood vessels of the body, in the same way as described for the eye. The tea is valuable for varicose veins and haemorrhoids, strengthening vein and capillary walls. The berries mashed into a paste are applied to haemorrhoids.
Bilberry leaves are a valuable herbal medicine in their own right, with a slightly different range of qualities, although often used in combination with the berries. The leaves are deciduous, and turn a beautiful red in autumn before they fall.
The particular and long-appreciated effect of the leaves is as an antiseptic tea for urogenital tract inflammation, especially of the bladder. This tea can also be drunk for ulcers, including of the mouth and tonsils.
Bilberry leaves are known to be hypoglaecemic, i.e. they reduce blood sugar levels, and are used successfully in treating late-onset diabetes. This is a slow-acting treatment, however, and taking the tea for long periods may lead to a build-up of tannins that is counter-productive. Some sources suggest using the leaf tea for only three weeks at a time; others say it is best with strawberry leaves.
Bilberry flowers on the Long Mynd, Shropshire, April
Julie uses bilberry syrup for eyesight and vascular problems. She says:
‘A friend asked me to make up bilberry syrup for her elderly neighbour. This lady had a lot of aching and discomfort in her legs from varicose veins but was about to go on a long walk, the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. She completed the pilgrimage successfully, walking several hundred kilometres, commenting that she could “feel her veins tightening up” when she took the syrup.’
Bilberry combines well with ginkgo tincture or glycerite for eye problems. Julie’s father has been taking this combination ever since he had surgery for a detached retina many years ago. His eye surgeon was initially sceptical, but checked into the research and now regularly recommends both these herbs to his patients.
Julie has used this combination for macular degeneration or retinal tears. Two cases stand out, both people with small tears in the retina. These were not bad enough to warrant surgery, but were intensely worrying to the people concerned, who came to see her to learn if further damage could be prevented.
In both cases, the patients went back to their eye specialists after taking bilberry and ginkgo for several months, and the specialists said words to the effect of ‘but there’s nothing there, we must have made a mistake when we looked at your eyes initially’. Not everyone may be as fortunate, but bilberry certainly has an important role to play in promoting and restoring eye health.
Bilberry syrup
Place your bilberries in a saucepan with just enough water to cover them. Simmer gently for half an hour, then leave to cool before squeezing out as much of the liquid as possible using a jelly bag. For every 500ml of liquid, add 500g demerara sugar, and boil until the sugar has dissolved completely. Pour into sterile bottles, label and store in a cool place.
Dose: 1 teaspoonful daily to maintain good eyesight and vascular health. For more acute problems, take 1 teaspoonful three times daily.
Bilberry glycerite
Fill a jar with bilberries and pour on vegetable glycerine to take up all the air spaces. Put the lid on and shake to get rid of any remaining bubbles, then top up again with glycerine. Keep the jar in a warm place, such as a sunny window ledge, by a range cooker or in an airing cupboard, for two or three weeks, then squeeze out the liquid using a jelly bag. Bottle, label and store in a cool place.
Dose: 1 teaspoonful daily to maintain good eyesight and vascular health. For more acute problems, take 1 teaspoonful three times daily.
Berry brandy pot
Start out with bilberries, placing them in the bottom of a jar or crock and then pouring on enough brandy (or whisky) to cover. You can, of course fill the whole jar with bilberries, or you can leave room and repeat the process with other berries in layers as they come into season – raspberries, blackberries, elderberries and lycium berries. Leave until winter and enjoy as a rather alcoholic treat, which will be packed with antioxidants and do your eyes and your veins a world of good. The liquid can be poured off and added to your syrup or glycerite, or left and enjoyed with the berries as a dessert with cream or however you like them.
Bilberry leaf tea
Use a heaped teaspoonful of the dried leaves per cup or mug of boiling water and leave to infuse for 5 to 10 minutes.
Dose: Drink a cupful every few hours for an acute urinary infection, or one cup daily to help maintain blood sugar levels.
A stand of silver birch in the Surrey hills, where the birch is so common it earned the name ‘Surrey weed’