Survives zone 5 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Grown chiefly for its intensely fragrant spring flowers rather than its fruit, which PFAF calls unpalatable — an ornamental/fragrance shrub, not a fruit crop.
- Hardiness
- Zone 5–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- June–Aug
- Mature size
- Bush 1–1.5 m; excellent in containers
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- China (Anhui, Gansu, Henan, Hubei, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Zhejiang), Japan and Korea; forest margins and stony slopes, 700-2,400 m.
- Status
- Ornamental
- Years to fruit
- 1–2 yrs
- Growth speed
- Moderate
- Spacing
- 150 cm (59 in) apart — about 2.3 m² (24 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Three- to five-lobed, up to 5–7 cm wide, coarsely toothed, usually downy.
- Root system
- Shallow and fibrous, the bulk of it in the top 30–45 cm and spreading wider than the bush is tall. Two consequences worth planning for: it dries out quickly in a hot summer, so mulch and water rather than cultivate around it, and low branches that touch the ground will often layer themselves, which is the easiest way to get a new plant.
- Fruit description
- Round, smooth-skinned, bright scarlet berries about 8–13 mm, held erect and persisting long on the branches; little flesh and an unpleasant, unpalatable taste even when ripe.
- Propagation
- Hardwood cuttings are close to foolproof: take pencil-thick shoots about 20–25 cm long in late autumn, push two-thirds into free-draining ground outdoors and leave them a year. Layering a low branch works too. Seed needs several months of cold stratification and is only worth it for breeding.
- Pollination
- DIOECIOUS — separate male and female plants are needed for fruit or seed at all.
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. Shade-tolerant, though it fruits (and flowers) better with more light.
Companion planting. Blister rust status is essentially unstudied for this Asian species — it's absent from every North American vector study checked, simply because it fell outside the historical US eradication-era research base. Don't assume it's safe near white pines just because it isn't flagged; treat as unknown risk.
Grow journal
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