Photo: US Federal Government — Public domain · source
Survives zone 6 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Federally listed as endangered in the United States — fewer than 40 wild populations remain, concentrated around pond margins and depression wetlands in the southeastern coastal plain, threatened mainly by wetland drainage and fire suppression. The bright red, spicy-aromatic fruit is not typically eaten by people; historically the twigs were brewed into a spring tonic tea. Grow only from nursery-propagated stock, never wild-collected material.
- Hardiness
- Zone 6–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit, Leaf
- Ripens
- Sept–Oct
- Mature size
- 0.3–2 m tall, typically under 1 m
- Light
- Full shade to full sun (best autumn color with some sun)
- Soil pH
- 5.0–6.5 (acidic), needs consistently moist to seasonally flooded ground
- Environment
- Warm temperate, seasonal wetland
- Native range
- Southeastern United States coastal plain — scattered sites in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri — pond margins, swampy depressions and seasonally flooded pinelands.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 3–5 yrs
- Growth speed
- Slow to moderate
- Spacing
- 150 cm (59 in) apart — about 2.3 m² (24 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Elliptic to obovate, 5–12 cm, entire margins, aromatic when crushed
- Root system
- Shallow and strongly rhizomatous — the plant spreads into clonal colonies rather than growing as individuals, which is why so few of the surviving wild stands contain both sexes and why the species struggles to set seed at all. Conservation propagation works around this by rooting cuttings.
- Fruit description
- Bright red, spicy-aromatic drupes, 6–13 mm, oval to round
- Propagation
- Softwood cuttings in early summer (the standard method for conservation propagation), or division of the rhizomatous colonies it naturally forms.
- Pollination
- Insect-pollinated; dioecious (separate male and female plants), so both are needed for fruit.
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
How it spreads. Spreads by underground rhizomes, forming dense colonies of a single clone
Growing tips. Needs the specific combination of wet feet and shade tolerance that made it rare as its wetland habitat disappeared — a woodland-margin or pond-edge planting suits it far better than an open, well-drained bed. Yellow flowers open on bare stems in very early spring, before the leaves.
Grow journal
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