Running serviceberry

Photo: Hardyplants at English Wikipedia — Public domain · source

Survives zone 4 through 8

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Small purple-black fruit about 8mm across, sweet and juicy and good fresh. The plant runs: it suckers freely into low thickets, which makes it a hedge or bank plant rather than a specimen, and it is naturalised well outside its range in parts of northern Europe.

Hardiness

Zone 4–8

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

July

Mature size

Thicket-forming shrub to 2 m, spreading indefinitely by suckers

Light

Full sun to light woodland shade

Soil pH

5.5–7.0 (mildly acid to neutral)

Environment

Temperate

Native range

Depends which treatment you follow, and the two disagree about whether this plant has a wild range at all. Modern floras make it Amelanchier × spicata, a hybrid of A. alnifolia and A. humilis grown in Europe since the late eighteenth century and possibly arisen there — naturalised across Scandinavia, the Baltic and central Europe, with no wild American range of its own. Jones (1946) instead sank the name into A. humilis, a real species of north-eastern North America running from Ontario to Michigan, Iowa and Pennsylvania in dry rocky places. The map follows the first reading and shows the European naturalisation.

Status

Both wild and cultivated

Years to fruit

2–4 yrs

Growth speed

Moderate

Spacing

200 cm (79 in) apart — about 4 m² (43 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Alternate, oval to oblong, 2–5 cm, finely toothed and woolly beneath when young, on low suckering stems.

Root system

Shallow, fibrous and suckering — the plant spreads into a multi-stemmed thicket by root shoots. That habit is how it is usually propagated, and the reason a single plant becomes a colony unless the suckers are removed.

Fruit description

Small purple-black pome 6–10 mm in short erect clusters, sweet and slightly almond-flavoured when fully ripe in midsummer. Good fresh and better cooked; birds usually take them first.

Propagation

Lift a rooted sucker — much the simplest method. Seed also works and, because a good deal of Amelanchier seed is apomictic, seedlings often come near-true to the parent. Named cultivars are grafted, sometimes onto Sorbus or Crataegus.

Pollination

Insect-pollinated; largely self-fertile.

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.