Love thy cloudberry (NOT THIS ONE)

When my family brought cloudberries home from the bog, the ripe ones always went straight onto pancakes or into jars; the green ones we spread across a blanket to ripen. I grew up in northern Latvia thinking cloudberries were completely normal. Only much later did I realise how rare they really are (we've made a map for you below). And how they can help us recover degraded wetlands. Cloudberries go by many names, including Arctic berries. They look like plump, amber-orange raspberries, and they taste like heaven: tart, fruity, somewhat floral, with a hint of honey and crunchy seeds to spice it up. In northern Europe, they're common. Cloudberries grow all over Finland and are enjoyed in the form of jam and desserts. The further south you go, however, the map gets patchier. In both Poland and Czechia, they're considered rare glacial relics. MAP - Cloudberry plants grow in peatlands and boggy forests and bear fruit under very specific conditions. When they struggle, it's an early indication of changing climate. Latvia is “at the southern edge of the cloudberry distribution range,” Laura Āboliņa, a researcher at the University of Latvia who has spent the past four years studying the plant, told us. Still, for such a fascinating berry people in Europe have foraged for forever, we know relatively little about it. The Latvian Botanical Society made the cloudberry its plant of the year in 2026, and is asking people to report sightings to, among other things, help establish whether there's movement in any direction in the warming climate. At the northern end of the cloudberry range, researchers in Svalbard, Norway, have just started to map and track their response to a changing climate. While the plant itself has been around Svalbard for a long time, ripe berries appeared for the first time after a particularly hot summer in 2023. Cloudberries have a delicate spot in commercial agriculture: Scandinavia has long-established cultivation practices and a large consumer market, but has always struggled with heavily fluctuating yields from year to year. In 2025, Sweden saw record-high cloudberry prices as a dry and hot summer caused a shortage, creating a (tragic) shortage of cloudberry jam in stores this spring. Latvians are also playing with the idea of growing them for commercial use. Āboliņa's team has found that former peat extraction sites in Latvia are broadly suitable for cloudberry cultivation. However, cloudberries' appeal goes beyond their heavenly-tasting fruit. Drained and extracted peatlands emit greenhouse gases, and, while peat soils cover only 2% of cultivated lands across the EU, they account for more than half of its CO₂ emissions from managed soils and land use. That's where our berry comes in: it can help rehabilitate degraded peatlands, as covering them with vegetation significantly reduces their emissions. It's already been done across the Baltics with cranberries and blueberries. Adding one more berry wouldn't hurt in Latvia, as nearly a third of all peat in the EU comes from there. Today, around 18,000 hectares of Latvian peatland affected by extraction are degraded and awaiting some form of reuse or restoration.