The dominant color of a cranberry bed in midsummer is pale pink. The recumbent vines are spangled with tiny flowers, each with four petal-like lobes, tinged with pink, that arch back from a protruding stamen. By September, about a third of these flowers will produce the familiar bright red berries.
About 150 growers produce all those berries. Many of them inherited their cranberry marshes from parents and grandparents, and many mailboxes on the roads around Babcock, where Ocean Spray has a receiving station for harvested berries, carry names that have been associated with cranberry growing since the 1870s. The houses behind those mailboxes look like they would fit right into any upper-middle-class suburb around Chicago. Willie Nelson is not likely to do a benefit for cranberry growers anytime soon. I met one grower who left the computer business to raise cranberries after his wife inherited the family marsh.
Or we could tell it as a triumph of the pure-hearted champions of the environment: the tree-huggers win one from the forces of greed.
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You can trace the origins of the fight back to two sources: one botanical and one legal. The botanical side begins with the cranberry plant itself: Vaccinium macrocarpon. To place it in the plant kingdom, it is a flowering plant of the family Ericaceae, commonly known as the heath family. Heaths are often plants of difficult environments, growing on mountain slopes or in the cold, acid waters of northern bogs. Many, even those living in quite cold climates, are evergreens, and their leaves are often leathery, with thick cuticles that prevent desiccation. Many have glorious flowers. Azaleas are heaths, and so are the rhododendrons of the southern Appalachians.
Starting with those midsummer beds spangled with pink flowers, the annual water regime of a cranberry bed looks like this:
In spring, when the winter flood thaws, the growers drain their beds and begin the summer regime of sprinkling periodically for irrigation and frost protection.
The growers justify their special status by pointing out that a potato grower without water may miss one harvest, but a cranberry grower without water could be out of business for as long as five years. A cranberry bed is like an orchard or vineyard that hugs the ground instead of growing upward. Its crop is a long-lived, woody perennial like an apple tree, and like apple trees cranberry vines take time to mature and produce fruit.
