Photo: Unknown — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 8 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 mainly as a California native/wildlife ornamental, notable for blooming in winter (October-March) when few other hummingbird nectar sources are available. Fruit is purple and edible but culinary use is thinly documented.
- Hardiness
- Zone 8–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- June–Aug
- Mature size
- Deciduous shrub 1–2 m, summer-dormant in drought
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Chaparral
- Native range
- Endemic to California's Coast Ranges (Marin to Los Angeles counties) and northern Baja California.
- Status
- Ornamental
- Years to fruit
- 1–2 yrs
- Growth speed
- Fast.
- Spacing
- 150 cm (59 in) apart — about 2.3 m² (24 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- 3–5-lobed, glandular-hairy leaves with toothed margins, 2–5 cm across.
- 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
- Small (~6–7 mm), globose berries with a glaucous purple skin, glandular and covered in fine white hairs; bland but palatable.
- Propagation
- Softwood cuttings, spring or summer.
- 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. Notable for winter bloom (October-March), an unusual timing that makes it valuable to overwintering hummingbirds in California's dry season.
Companion planting. Ribes as a genus are blister rust alternate hosts (some areas restrict planting near white pines), but no species-specific susceptibility rating for R. malvaceum was found — treat as an open question.
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