Photo: Eric Hunt — CC BY 2.5 · source
Survives zone 6 through 9
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Orange-red raspberry-type fruit; mild, edible.
- Hardiness
- Zone 6–9
- Habit
- Shrub
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer
- Mature size
- Shrub 1–2 m
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0
- Environment
- Temperate
- Native range
- Native to Japan (introduced to Western cultivation around 1888), particularly milder, near-coastal regions.
- Status
- Wild
- Years to fruit
- 2–3 yrs
- Growth speed
- Fast — canes make 1–3 m in a season
- Spacing
- 200 cm (79 in) apart — about 4 m² (43 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Large (10–25cm across), palmately lobed leaves with 5–7 ovate, pointed, doubly toothed lobes reaching halfway to two-thirds of the way to the leaf base — dark, lustrous green, and distinctive enough to be compared to Fatsia japonica foliage rather than to other cultivated Rubus.
- Root system
- A perennial crown and shallow spreading root system in the top 30–40 cm, carrying biennial canes: each cane grows one year, fruits the next, then dies. New shoots come from buds on both the crown and the roots, which is why a bramble returns from root fragments left after digging and why it is so hard to remove once settled.
- Fruit description
- Globose, yellow or orange-red raspberry-type aggregate fruit that separates cleanly from the receptacle (hollow like a true raspberry) when ripe; flavor is mild and pleasant.
- Propagation
- Seed (stratified, sown in early autumn in a cold frame); half-ripe wood cuttings in midsummer; tip layering in July; division in early spring or before leaf-fall.
- 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 by biennial canes arising from a woody rootstock rather than by aggressive suckering or tip-rooting.
Growing tips. Thornless, erect, sparsely branched, somewhat zigzagged stems to about 1.2–2m; leaves are produced only in a cane's first year, with flowering/fruiting laterals the second year; becomes evergreen or semi-evergreen in sheltered sites; being adapted to a mild, near-coastal Japanese climate, plants often flower and fruit poorly if grown well outside that range; like most Rubus, watch for honey fungus.
Grow journal
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