Summer in Sweden: Where the Wild Berries Grow
Written & Photographed by Clarissa Wei
Summer in Sweden is a special sort of heaven, where the sun is soft and never sets, and the forest drips decadently with wild berries. Seventy percent of the country is forested, inhabited by rows of coniferous trees cushioned on rolling carpets of moss. And if you know where to look and when, there are bushes full of nature’s candy scattered all around—clusters of fruit in bejeweled hues of red, magenta, royal blue, deep purple, cream and bright pink.
“There are bilberries, wild strawberries and brambles. I also found some deserted cherry trees the other day,” says Stockholm-based forager and herbalist Lisen Sundgren. “There’s rose hip, which I love, and also, in the fall, there will be wild elderberries, hawthorn and sloe berries. If you go up north, there are cloudberries, arctic berries, and cranberries.”
There are around 30 to 40 types of berries in the country, though the criteria of what makes a berry a berry gets murky depending on who you ask. In botany, a berry is technically a fruit sans a pit, but in common parlance, the word berry refers simply to a small fruit. The point is, the summer forests of Sweden are plump with small fruits and many of them, like bilberries ,a smaller but punchier relative of American blueberry, and lingonberries, which are commonly made into jam, can only be found in the wild.
“We’re a country rich and abundant in wild berries,” says Sundgren. “Yet we forage so little of it.”
Every year, the forests of Sweden produce about 400,000 tons of wild berries, but only six percent of those are picked, according to a 2019 paper. And many of the ones that are picked are exported. According to a 2009 study, roughly 40% of commercially picked bilberries in Sweden have been going straight to the East Asian market.
“Berries sold in Sweden are imported, and Swedish berries are exported on the global market, mainly to the health industry in China and Japan,” says Charlotta Hedberg, a professor of geography at Umeå University who has written papers on the Swedish berry trade.
That trade is a multimillion-dollar industry. Since 2007, it has largely been supported by seasonal berry pickers from Thailand who are brought over by foreign staffing agencies in order to avoid taxation.
But the lack of foraging among Swedes isn’t out of disinterest. It’s simply because there are too many berries to go around and not enough people. The country of Sweden—the largest by landmass in northern Europe—only has 10.23 million people (that’s around the population of Los Angeles County), and if everyone in Sweden were to pick berries, each individual would have to rack up at least 80 pounds in order to deplete the annual wild berry yield.
In fact, for many Scandinavians, foraging is a cultural norm. My husband—born and raised in southern Sweden—laughs at me when I call it foraging, because for him, the word foraging implies that it is something trendy. For him, it’s really nothing all that special or new. “We pick berries and mushrooms,” he’ll say as if it were the most plain thing in the world.
Danish chef and writer Mette Helbæk, who currently lives in southern Sweden, agrees.
“Since I was very young, my family and I would go on canoe and bicycle trips in Sweden, where we would set up a tent at a lake, make tea out of boiled lake water and whatever herbs were around,” she says. “We’d pick mushrooms, bilberries, raspberries and wild strawberries for dinner in the forest. Foraging was not a name I knew before the New Nordic Kitchen craze hit Copenhagen around ten to 15 years ago.”
My husband has his own picking spots where chanterelles reliably come up, and where the bilberries are most abundant. Many of these places he found himself, and some are family heirlooms, like a secret mushroom spot his late grandmother really liked. He has memories of her collecting ripe elderberries to make soda with and of riding into the forest on his dad’s shoulders to look for signs of bright trumpet-shaped fungi.
“We were a very poor country not very long ago,” says Sundgren. “We depended on foods in the forest and in the wild. People would go out and preserve berries in various ways. We made a lot of jam because sugar is a preservative.”
Unlike in the United States, where property lines are sacred and delineated by giant “No Trespassing” signs, Swedes have more freedom in where they can wander. There’s a Swedish concept called allemansrätten, which translates to “all man’s right.” It’s the right for anyone to go in the countryside, forage and pitch a tent—within reason and without disturbing land owners.
“Sweden’s rules make it possible for anyone to walk anywhere they want,” says Helbæk. “This, in combination with the vastness of the forests and lakes here in rural Sweden, makes getting out in the wild an easily accessible thing to do for people.
“I have seen 12-year-old boys cut a moose [they hunted] in parts, and I know little girls who are masters at spotting chanterelle mushrooms,” she says. “They don’t do it because it’s trendy, rather it’s old-fashioned, but because it’s a part of their lifestyle.”
Many Swedes also have their own places in the woods—red-painted sommarstugor, or summer houses, which are at the center of Swedish country life. These wooden cottages are usually passed down throughout the generations, where a mix of cultivated and wild berries can be found all alongside the property. Many families will retreat to their cabins in the summer months, when the currant and gooseberry bushes begin to sag with fruit. There, the start of the berry season is also marked with parties on Midsummer, an annual holiday which falls every year around the summer solstice.
“Every Swede has strawberries on their Midsummer table,” says Anna Biärsjö, the eighth generation owner of Hallongården, a berry farm in Sweden. “There’s cake with strawberries and strawberry with vanilla ice cream. Summer really marks the beginning of the berry season.”
Kids will also pick tiny, wild strawberries—known as a smultron, and thread them like beads on straw or a string.
Around my husband’s family’s property, there are also thick bushes of cultivated raspberry, gooseberry and black currant in the garden—all of indeterminate age, planted and tended by the many generations of people before him. While not wild, these bushes are permanent fixtures to the land.
“When it comes to gooseberries, they originated from somewhere in Scandinavia and were brought by the Vikings first to Normandy and then further to England,” says Swedish author Martin Ragnar, who has written more than 30 books about Swedish food culture and histort—including two specifically on berries.
The black currant is another berry bush with deep cultural significance in Sweden.
“The starting point for cultivated black currant is the archipelago of Stockholm,” Ragnar says. “You find numerous small homes or small islands on the archipelago with names reminiscent of black currant. And the genetic variety of black currant in the archipelago is extraordinarily big.”
But for Ragnar, the cultivated berries are secondary to the wild ones.
“Cloudberries are generally considered by most Swedes to be the finest berry of all, but when I was a child, my mother told me that there was something even better than the cloudberry,” he says.
That something is the elusive arctic bramble—a berry that took Ragnar nearly 30 years to find. “It was the closest thing to a religious experience I had ever done,” he says. “Picking half a liter was like seeing god for me.”
He says that the taste of the arctic bramble is a perfect harmony of sweet and sour—a concentrated burst of fruitiness unlike anything he has ever had before. Some describe it as a cross between a raspberry and a strawberry, and Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern day taxonomy, “claimed it to be the most tasty berry in all of Europe,” says Ragnar.
In Sweden, the arctic bramble can only be found in small quantities and north of Sundsvall, a four-hour drive up from Stockholm.
“It only grows in the colder places and you can find it in northern Sweden, northern Finland, and northern Russia,” he says. “You can find other species similar to it in Alaska and Canada.” It thrives on the sides of the fields and meadows, mostly in places with grazing animals. “However, grazing animals and the farm is something that doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. Also climate change means it gets warmer and warmer and that’s another threat.”
Indeed, some observational studies from northern Sweden have found evidence that late winter warming events may reduce bilberry production by up to 95 percent.
“[The berries] ideally need a solid cold winter snow cover and no freezing event in spring,” says Anne Hertel, a PhD researcher on ecology who has studied Swedish berries and their effect on the local bear population. “And the summer should be dry, but not too dry. Basically a good old Swedish summer.”
Hertel says that the evidence on climate change and berries is not conclusive because of a limited amount of data. However, she does acknowledge that changing weather patterns will inevitably affect wild berry yields.
“The southern range limit for bilberries is Spain and bilberries just aren’t really available there anymore,” she says. “There’s been this upward latitudinal shift.”
The biggest threat to wild Swedish berries, she says, is land use. Because of the demand for wood, many commercial Swedish forests have shortened their growing time for timber from 100 years to 80 years. Essentially, forests are being logged at a faster rate. Many berries like bilberry and lingonberry rely on the shaded environment of forests to grow; when the forest is cut down, it takes the berries 30 to 40 years to come back up again.
My husband’s summer house is at the edge of many of these commercial plots, and the difference is astounding between where there are trees and where there are no trees. We are finding all our bilberries in intact forest plots exclusively—dark blue gems tucked underneath layers of green.
We’ve been spending hours hunched down in the forest, our fingers stained with splotches of blue and purple. These smaller, wild bilberries have so much more flavor than the American blueberry, and that’s not their only benefit.
“Wild plants are more nutrient dense because they have to protect themselves against insects, drought, rain, and wind,” says Sundgren. “They have a sweet flavor so that animals will be interested in eating them.”
But berry picking is a lot more than acquiring tasty fruit, at least according to all the people I talked to for this piece. It’s a transformative process that fosters a closer sense to nature.
“We get to satisfy our need for collecting things. This is something the human brain is wired for since before we had a language: we release reward hormones when we collect something that will help us survive,” says Helbæk. “Nowadays we usually release these hormones by collecting candy bars at the gas station, furniture at Ikea, or cheap gadgets at the dollar store. Foraging for berries is a wonderful alternative to over-consumption, I find.”
And it’s just a great way to relax. “When we go out in nature, our whole body relaxes,” adds Sundgren. “Foraging is a good way for people to stop and stay in one spot for a while.”
