Photo: Bearas — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
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.
Large red fruit resembling a strawberry-raspberry — honestly bland and seedy, better cooked.
- Hardiness
- Zone 5–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Seed, Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer
- Mature size
- Low suckering subshrub 30–60 cm; containerable
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Native to Japan — Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku — where it grows in thickets and waste ground.
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 1–2 yrs
- Growth speed
- Spreads freely once established via underground runners — can expand into a broad colony within a couple of seasons if not contained.
- Spacing
- 75 cm (30 in) apart — about 1.8 per m² (1.7 per 10 sq ft)
- Leaf shape
- Pinnately compound leaves with 5–7 lanceolate, toothed leaflets on green, prickly, angled annual shoots 60–90 cm tall — a low, non-woody sub-shrub rather than a true cane bramble.
- Root system
- Spreads by shallow creeping underground runners/rhizomes rather than deep roots, forming an expanding colony from the crown.
- Fruit description
- A large, showy red compound fruit about 3 cm across, made up of numerous small drupelets — fairly large and sweet-smelling but insipid and seedy eaten raw; cooking into jam develops more flavor.
- Propagation
- Easiest by division of the spreading underground runners/suckers in spring or autumn; also by semi-ripe cuttings in July–August or by stratified seed.
- 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. Undemanding — succeeds in ordinary well-drained soil across a wide pH range with only a light annual mulch. Avoid rich feeding, since it already spreads freely and can become weedy on good ground.
How it spreads. Spreads by creeping underground rhizome-like runners, sending up new annual flowering shoots from the crown and forming an expanding colony — behaving more like a suckering groundcover than an upright bramble, and capable of becoming invasive in a favorable site.
Growing tips. A low sub-shrub with little persistent woody growth — the top typically dies back over winter and regrows from the crown and runners each spring, unlike the biennial canes of true raspberries and blackberries. Stems are prickly with curved thorns despite the low stature; best contained with a root barrier unless its spread is welcome.
Grow journal
Sign in to keep a dated log of when you planted, bloomed and harvested this plant.