About

A reference for unusual edible plants — fruits, nuts and wild cultivars — indexed by the coldest hardiness zone each will tolerate.

Reading the zone figures

Zones follow the USDA scale. The range shown is where a species can be expected to survive winter, which is not the same as where it will ripen a crop — jujube and pomegranate are hardy well beyond the point where summers are warm enough to produce fruit. Shelter, drainage and a warm wall routinely buy a zone; exposure and wet soil lose one.

Where the data comes from

Compiled from published horticultural references and cross-checked against Plants of the World Online for accepted botanical names. Nothing here is a substitute for a local nursery who knows your ground.

Plant photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and stay under their own licences, credited on each species page. Native and introduced ranges come from GBIF. Photo identification is provided by Pl@ntNet, and frost and planting forecasts by Open-Meteo. None of it has been reviewed or approved by any of them — see the disclaimer.

The "Ask" assistant answers only from this site's own catalogue — it is given the matching species' facts as its only source of truth and told not to reason from anything else — rather than a general-purpose model's own knowledge, which is not curated for accuracy here.

Store links

Each species page's "Where to find it" list is found by an automated search, refreshed on a rotating schedule roughly every six weeks, and filterable by country (US, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, or other). No prices or stock levels are tracked, and a listing here is not a guarantee of availability.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, say so in the forum and I will fix it.

Before you eat anything

Plenty of species here have edible parts growing alongside toxic ones, and some have dangerous look-alikes. Never eat a plant on the strength of this site — or of any photo identification — without confirming it with someone who can examine the actual plant. The full warning is in the disclaimer.

Your data

There is no tracking, no analytics and no advertising on this site, and you can browse the whole database without an account. The privacy policy sets out what is stored if you do create one, and what you can ask to have removed.