The raspberry is not one plant but a scattering of closely related brambles gathered independently by peoples across the whole temperate Northern Hemisphere, and the fruit of the modern kitchen is younger, as a cultivated crop, than the potato or the tomato. Botanically it belongs to the genus Rubus, the vast and tangled tribe of brambles that also holds the blackberry, and to the subgenus Idaeobatus, the true raspberries, distinguished from their blackberry cousins by a single elegant trick: the ripe raspberry pulls free of its pale central core, leaving the fruit a hollow thimble of tiny drupelets, whereas the blackberry carries its core away with it. The fruit is not a berry at all in the botanical sense but an aggregate of drupelets, each a miniature stone fruit with its own seed, clustered upon the receptacle like the cells of a honeycomb.

The dominant cultivated raspberry is the European red raspberry, Rubus idaeus, which grows wild across the whole of Europe and western Asia, from the Atlantic seaboard through the forests of Germany and Poland to the Caucasus and Siberia, favouring woodland clearings, the margins of forests, and the disturbed ground of old fires and fellings. It was gathered by the peoples of Europe since the last Ice Age, and its seeds are found in the middens of Neolithic and Roman settlements alike; yet unlike the apple or the grape it was left in the wild for millennia, too fragile, too seedy, and too freely available in the hedgerow to be worth the trouble of the orchard. Only in the sixteenth century did European gardeners begin to cultivate it in earnest, and the first named varieties, red and white, are recorded in the English herbals of the fifteen-hundreds.

Across the Atlantic, quite separately, North America raised its own raspberries. The American red raspberry, R. idaeus subsp. strigosus, is so close to the European plant that the two interbreed freely, and its hardiness would later be bred into the commercial red raspberry to carry it through the North American winter. Beside it grew the black raspberry, Rubus occidentalis, the 'blackcap' of the eastern woodlands, a distinct fruit of deep purple-black colour and a drier, more intense flavour, gathered and dried for the winter by dozens of Indigenous nations long before any European settler arrived. On the far side of the world, in Korea and the mountains of East Asia, a third lineage was tamed: Rubus coreanus, the Korean black raspberry or bokbunja, valued first as a medicine and then as the fruit of one of the most distinctive fruit wines of the peninsula. These separate domestications, European, American, and Korean, are the reason the raspberry has not one homeland but several, and why its story is really three stories that only met in the modern age of horticulture.

The raspberry's travels were, for most of its history, no travels at all: the plant grew wild across three continents and was gathered where it grew, and its extreme perishability, bruising and moulding within a day or two of picking, kept it a local and seasonal pleasure long after hardier fruits had been carried around the world. The classical world knew the wild red raspberry of Europe and Anatolia well enough to give it its lasting name; Pliny the Elder, in the first century CE, called it the fruit of Mount Ida in the Troad, and the Latin Rubus idaeus, 'the bramble of Ida', preserves that attribution to this day. The Roman agriculturalist Palladius, in the fourth century, gives the first hint of deliberate cultivation, but for the whole of the Middle Ages the raspberry remained chiefly a wild fruit of the forest and the monastery physic garden, gathered for its fruit and its leaves alike, the leaf brewed as a medicine long prized by midwives.

Serious cultivation began in the sixteenth century, and it began in the gardens of Northern Europe. English herbalists of the fifteen-hundreds describe the 'raspis' grown red and white in the garden; by the seventeenth century the raspberry had become a settled kitchen-garden fruit across Britain, France, and the German-speaking lands, where the confectioners of Linz set raspberry preserve beneath the lattice of ground-almond pastry to make what may be the oldest named cake in the European record. From these Northern European gardens the raspberry spread outward with the movements of peoples: British settlers carried it to the temperate colonies of the southern hemisphere, where it took to the cool highlands of New Zealand and the hills of Tasmania and Victoria, and European emigrants carried both seed and cuttings to North America, where the imported red raspberry was crossed with the hardy native strigosus to build an industry able to survive the continental winter.

In the modern age the raspberry became, at last, a fruit that could travel. Refrigeration, controlled-atmosphere shipping, and, above all, the deep-freezing of the fruit for jam, juice, and the confectionery trade freed it from the tyranny of its own fragility, and cultivation shifted toward the places whose climate and economics best suited it. The Pacific Northwest of the United States and the neighbouring valleys of British Columbia became the heart of the North American crop; Russia, drawing on the deep folk affection for the wild forest raspberry, remained one of the largest growers of all; and, most remarkably, the small Balkan nation of Serbia, and above all the town of Arilje, turned the raspberry into a national export of such value that Serbs call it 'red gold', supplying a large share of the world's frozen raspberries to the kitchens and factories of Europe. From a fruit too tender to leave its own hedgerow, the raspberry has become one of the most widely traded soft fruits on earth.

The raspberry today is a fruit of two lives. The first is the fresh raspberry of the punnet and the summer garden, still fragile, still fleeting, and still, at its best, one of the most exquisite of all fruits: eaten by the handful, folded into cream, and scattered over the great summer puddings of the European table. The second is the industrial raspberry, picked and instantly frozen or pulped, that underlies a vast trade in jam, juice, coulis, liqueur, yoghurt, and confectionery, and that has made the flavour of raspberry one of the most familiar in the world even to people who have never eaten a fresh one. The commercial crop is overwhelmingly the red raspberry, Rubus idaeus in its many modern cultivars, both the summer-fruiting canes that crop once on the previous year's growth and the autumn-fruiting 'primocane' varieties that fruit on the current season's canes and have greatly lengthened the raspberry year.

Production is concentrated in a handful of temperate regions. Russia and Serbia together account for a very large share of the world crop, the Serbian harvest around Arilje flowing almost entirely into the frozen-fruit trade of Europe; Poland, Mexico, the United States, and Chile are the other great growers, the Pacific Northwest supplying much of the North American processed crop and Mexico and Chile between them keeping fresh raspberries on northern shelves through the winter months. Alongside the red raspberry, the black raspberry (R. occidentalis) survives as a distinct North American speciality, grown in Oregon for its intense flavour and its deep purple juice, and the Korean black raspberry (R. coreanus) is cultivated for bokbunja-ju, the sweet, dark fruit wine that is one of the signature drinks of Korea.

The raspberry sits at the heart of an unusually rich body of regional tradition for so lately cultivated a fruit. It is the fruit of the Scottish summer and of cranachan, the whisky-laced cream, oats, and raspberry pudding of the Highlands; of the English summer pudding, in which the juice of raspberries and other soft fruits soaks scarlet through a case of bread; of the Austrian Linzer torte and the German raspberry spirit Himbeergeist; of the Russian raspberry preserve stirred into tea against the cold; of the Norwegian bringebærgrøt and the French tarte aux framboises and the raspberry coulis that Escoffier poured over his peach Melba. From a wild fruit of three continents, gathered but scarcely grown for the whole of history, the raspberry has become both an everyday industrial flavour and one of the most cherished luxuries of the northern summer.