Photo: Nadiatalent — Public domain · 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.
Small red raspberry-type fruit — mildly sweet, pleasant, low-yielding.
- Hardiness
- Zone 5–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer
- Mature size
- Low trailing to arching shrub 0.5–1.5 m; containerable
- Light
- Full sun to partial (open grassland and forest margin)
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Temperate and subtropical East Asia — China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan — and tropical Asia (Vietnam) and Australia (Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia).
- Status
- Both wild and cultivated
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Medium growth rate; low-mounding to erect stems typically well under 1.5 m.
- Spacing
- 180 cm (71 in) apart — about 3.2 m² (35 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Compound leaf with 3-5 rounded-to-ovate leaflets, sharply and sometimes deeply toothed, wrinkled and nearly hairless above but white- to grey-woolly beneath — smaller and more typical of the genus than the maple-like simple leaves of R. odoratus and R. parviflorus.
- Root system
- Biennial canes arise from a perennial rootstock; the roots sucker and the cane tips root on contact with soil, letting the plant form spreading, matted patches.
- Fruit description
- Small aggregate fruit made up of comparatively large individual drupelets, red and juicy, with a good flavor for its size — eaten raw or cooked into pies and preserves.
- Propagation
- By seed with cold stratification; by half-ripe wood cuttings taken July-August; by tip-layering in July; or by division of suckers in early spring or autumn.
- 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
How it spreads. Spreads vegetatively as cane tips root on contact with soil, and by bird-dispersed seed, forming a dense, matted groundcover. Minnesota's DNR lists it as an invasive terrestrial plant where it has naturalized, noting it can crowd out other low vegetation, though it cautions that its ecological impact there is still not well understood since it is documented in only a handful of states and counties.
Growing tips. Unlike R. odoratus and R. parviflorus, this species is not thornless — young stems carry stout hooked or straight prickles to about 3.5 mm. It tolerates a wide pH range and both sun and considerable shade, and its low, lax, arching stems (rarely over 1 m) make it as useful for spreading groundcover as for fruit.
Grow journal
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