Photo: Walter Siegmund (talk) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Survives zone 3 through 8
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Produces a soft, thimble-shaped aggregate fruit — the ripe drupelets lift off the receptacle as a hollow cap, giving the fruit (and the plant) its name — that is tart to pleasantly sweet but very seedy and too soft to ship, so it is grown as a garden or native/restoration plant rather than for commercial fruit.
- Hardiness
- Zone 3–8
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Thornless suckering shrub 1–3 m
- Light
- Partial to full sun — forest-edge/clearing species, fruits in dappled light
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Western North America — from Alaska south through the Rocky Mountains and Pacific states to California, New Mexico and northern Mexico, with disjunct native populations east to the Black Hills of South Dakota and the Great Lakes region.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Medium rate of cane growth, but rapid clonal spread — rhizome colonies expand quickly to dominate open ground, especially after fire or clear-cutting.
- Spacing
- 120 cm (47 in) apart — about 1.4 m² (16 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Large, simple (not compound), palmately lobed leaves with 3-7 (usually 5) pointed lobes, up to 20 cm across, soft and fuzzy in texture and maple-like in outline — like R. odoratus, an unusual simple-leaf form for the genus.
- Root system
- Extensive rhizomatous root system rather than a simple taproot — rhizomes spread widely underground and resprout readily after fire, cutting, or other disturbance, letting individual clones persist for decades.
- Fruit description
- Hemispherical red aggregate fruit about 20 mm across; the drupelets lift off intact as a hollow cap, giving a thimble-like shape. Texture is soft and notably seedy; flavor ranges from tart to pleasantly sweet, good in jam but too soft and perishable to be grown commercially.
- Propagation
- By seed — requires cold stratification, sown in early autumn in a cold frame; also readily by tip-layering in July, division of suckers in early spring, or by planting dormant rhizome segments, which root easily.
- 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 an ordinary well-drained loamy soil kept evenly moist, without a special feeding regime. As with R. odoratus, heavy nitrogen mainly encourages more rhizome spread rather than better fruiting, so an annual compost mulch is usually all it needs.
How it spreads. Spreads by an extensive network of underground rhizomes — on cleared sites in Oregon individual rhizomes have been measured averaging about 2 m long with roughly 14 buds per meter — forming large clonal colonies that can persist for decades (documented clones surviving 45+ years). PFAF describes it as 'less invasive' in garden settings than the related R. odoratus, but it still spreads readily and is one of the first shrubs to recolonize clearcuts and burned ground.
Growing tips. Thornless, like R. odoratus, and easy to handle in the garden. Shows intermediate shade tolerance — ground cover reaches its maximum in full sun but the species persists, at reduced density, in closed-canopy forest understory, consistent with its natural role as a woodland-edge and forest-gap colonizer. Susceptible to honey fungus. Young shoots are edible cooked, likened to asparagus.
Grow journal
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