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.
An evergreen, mat-forming bramble of East Asian forest floors rather than an upright cane fruit — slender, mostly thornless stems creep and root at the nodes, throwing out stolons up to 2 m long to knit into a dense groundcover. The fruit is a purplish-black, roughly 25 mm sphere, edible raw or cooked, though it's harvested from the wild for local use rather than grown as a dedicated fruit crop.
- Hardiness
- Zone 7–9
- Habit
- Groundcover
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Creeping evergreen groundcover 10–30 cm tall, spreading by runners
- Light
- Shade to partial (evergreen forest-floor creeper)
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- East Asia — China, central and southern Japan, and South Korea, growing in broad-leaved and mixed forests at low to medium elevations.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Moderate spreader — stolons extend up to 2 m, gradually knitting into a continuous mat.
- Spacing
- 60 cm (24 in) apart — about 2.8 per m² (2.6 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Simple leaves (unusual for the genus, which is mostly compound-leaved), ovate to nearly round, 5–11 cm across, palmately five-veined with a heart-shaped base and a shallowly 5–7-lobed margin.
- Root system
- Fibrous roots beneath creeping, node-rooting stems and long stolons — spread is by surface layering rather than a taproot or suckering rhizome.
- Fruit description
- A purplish-black, subglobose aggregate fruit about 25 mm across, edible raw or cooked; historically also used to yield a purple-to-dull-blue dye.
- Propagation
- By seed (cold-stratified, sown in a cold frame in early autumn), by half-ripe cuttings in midsummer, by tip-layering in July, or by division in spring.
- Pollination
- Self-fertile
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. Grows well in ordinary good, well-drained loamy soil in sun or semi-shade; no special acidity or heavy feeding is documented, though it is reported to be notably susceptible to honey fungus (Armillaria).
How it spreads. Spreads by creeping stems that root at the nodes and by stolons up to 2 m long, forming a dense mat rather than climbing or forming upright canes.
Growing tips. One of the few Rubus species grown deliberately as a shade-tolerant evergreen groundcover — it stays low (around 30 cm) and spreads outward rather than up. Watch for honey fungus, to which it is reported to be notably susceptible.
Grow journal
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