Royalty Purple Raspberry (Bundle of 3) | Spring 2027

This is our first year growing Royalty, so everything below is secondhand until we get more long-term data from our own mother plants.

Overview

Royalty is a purple raspberry from Cornell with very large, sweet berries that you can pick red or wait on until they turn purple. It's one of the best raspberries for jam and freezing.

Origin and History

It was released in 1982 by Cornell's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva and patented in 1985. According to the patent, it's roughly three quarters red raspberry and one quarter black raspberry, from a cross made in 1954 between two Geneva selections with Cumberland, Newburgh and Indian Summer in their background.

Fruit and Uses

The berries are very large, soft and sweet. The patent calls them "as sweet as most red raspberry fruit." They're reddish-purple when fully ripe, and you can pick them early. The University of Minnesota says to "pick red for bright raspberry flavor, or purple for sweet, rich flavor." Cornell calls it "excellent for processing," and the patent says it makes "outstanding jelly or jam." It's too soft to ship, so it's a backyard berry.

Growth Habit and Spacing

Royalty is summer-bearing and late, ripening in late July at Geneva. The canes are tall, vigorous and thorny. Unlike most purple raspberries, which stay in clumps, Royalty spreads by root suckers and fills in a hedgerow, so give it room. It's immune to the large raspberry aphid, which spreads mosaic virus, but it is susceptible to crown gall.

Pollination

Royalty is self-fertile, so one variety is all you need.

Cold Hardiness

Be careful with this one. The patent says most of its test sites rated it well for hardiness, but the University of Minnesota rates its hardiness only fair to poor, and Wisconsin Extension says it needs winter protection and "is not fully hardy even in southern Wisconsin." We've listed it at zone 4, but in the colder end of that, expect some cane dieback. Snow cover or laying the canes down and mulching them will help.

Representative illustration, not Royalty itself: Shaffer, an older purple raspberry. Illustration: “Shaffer” by an unknown artist, USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection, Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library (POM00007272). Public domain.

About the photo: this isn’t Royalty itself. Photos of Royalty are either under copyright or simply unavailable, so we picked the open-source image that looks closest to the fruit. Photo: “Rubus 'Wyoming'” by Nadiatalent, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.