Photo: Walter Siegmund (talk) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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.
PFAF calls it one of the finest wild North American gooseberries for eating — sweet-tart, thin-skinned, purple-black fruit, genuinely good rather than just edible.
- Hardiness
- Zone 6–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- June–Aug
- Mature size
- Arching spiny deciduous shrub 1–3 m
- Light
- Partial to full sun
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Southern British Columbia to south-central coastal California, mostly west of the Cascades.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 1–2 yrs
- Growth speed
- Moderate.
- Spacing
- 180 cm (71 in) apart — about 3.2 m² (35 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Palmately lobed leaves 2–6 cm wide with 3–5 lobes, regularly toothed, hairy undersides.
- Root system
- A heart-root pattern of primary roots branching from the crown, with suckering spread via underground runners.
- Fruit description
- Smooth berries to about 10 mm, dark purple to black when ripe, with sweet juicy pulp and a slightly sour skin — regarded as one of the best-flavored wild North American gooseberries.
- Propagation
- Seed (sow ripe in autumn, cold-stratify 4-5 months) or cuttings.
- Pollination
- Hermaphrodite flowers, insect-pollinated. No self-compatibility study for this species specifically: cultivated currants and gooseberries are largely self-fruitful, but controlled work on wild western Ribes found several species outright self-sterile, so a single plant is not a safe assumption. Plant two.
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
Growing tips. One of the wild American species (along with R. hirtellum and R. oxyacanthoides) bred into European gooseberry cultivars specifically to add resistance to American gooseberry mildew — a useful genetic parent, not just a wild curiosity.
Companion planting. Blister rust risk isn't well documented for this species specifically — it falls outside the interior-West hazard-rating studies. One source notes it tends to shed infected leaves early, which may reduce (but doesn't eliminate) its practical role as a vector; treat as an open question rather than assuming it's safe.
Grow journal
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