Photo: VoDeTan2Dericks-Tan — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 7 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Genuinely juicy rather than dry and mealy like most of this genus — a rich flavor often compared to pineapple, with a pleasant acidity once the fruit is deep red and fully soft. Astringent if picked underripe.
- Hardiness
- Zone 7–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Late summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Evergreen shrub 3–5 m tall and wide; container-awkward
- Light
- Partial to full sun — fruits little in shade
- Soil pH
- 5.5–8.5 (very wide; nitrogen-fixing)
- Environment
- Garden origin
- Native range
- None — a garden hybrid (E. macrophylla × E. pungens) raised in cultivation, so it has no wild native range; the parent species are from Japan, Korea and China.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- 30–60 cm/year — fast, quickly making a dense hedge or screen.
- Spacing
- 250 cm (98 in) apart — about 6.3 m² (67 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Evergreen, leathery, oval, 5–10 cm long, glossy dark green above and densely silver-scaly with brown flecks beneath.
- Root system
- Fibrous and widely spreading laterally, and — the point that matters in a planting plan — carrying root nodules of the actinomycete Frankia, so the plant fixes its own nitrogen and feeds its neighbours. Interplanted autumn olive has been measured contributing on the order of 90 kg of nitrogen per hectare per year.
- Fruit description
- Oval orange-red drupes about 2 cm long, silver-speckled, ripening in spring rather than autumn — a useful oddity — with juicy, tart flesh over a single stone.
- Propagation
- Seed after about 4 weeks warm stratification followed by 12 weeks cold at around 4°C. Half-ripe wood cuttings 7–10 cm with a heel in July–August, or mature current-year wood 10–12 cm with a heel in November, both in a cold frame. Suckers can be lifted where the plant throws them.
- Pollination
- Insect-pollinated, flowering in autumn and fruiting the following spring — an unusual cycle for a hardy shrub. Being a hybrid clone, a lone plant sets fruit erratically; a second, different Elaeagnus flowering alongside it improves matters.
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.
Growing guide
Fertilizing. Nitrogen-fixing; needs little supplemental feed beyond an annual mulch of compost or a balanced fertilizer in spring.
How it spreads. Spreads by root suckers and self-seeds via bird-dispersed fruit; can form dense thickets and behave weedily in mild climates, though this hybrid's seedlings don't come true from seed.
Growing tips. Cut back hard after flowering to control its naturally fast, large-growing habit; watch for the gall-forming Elaeagnus sucker insect and occasional coral spot or honey fungus; can develop leaf chlorosis on shallow chalky soils despite otherwise wide soil tolerance.
Companion planting. Fixes nitrogen via root-nodule symbiosis with Frankia bacteria; permaculture practitioners commonly interplant Elaeagnus species near fruit trees as a fertility-boosting companion, though rigorous evidence for this specific genus is thin — the best hard evidence for nitrogen-fixing shrubs benefiting nearby fruit trees comes from a 1968 study using alder hedges near apples, a real yield gain but only in nitrogen-poor, unfertilized soil.
Grow journal
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