Sorbus × Aronia hybrid (cvs 'Fallax', 'Saule')

Photo: Caroline Léna Becker — CC BY 3.0 · source

Survives zone 3 through 7

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Dark berries between rowan and chokeberry — astringent, best cooked/for juice. ⚠ Not just astringent: raw fruit in this group contains parasorbic acid, which causes vomiting, stomach cramps and diarrhoea if you eat any quantity of it. Cooking, freezing, drying or a hard frost converts it to harmless sorbic acid — which is exactly why every traditional recipe cooks it and why the fruit is picked after the first frosts.

Hardiness

Zone 3–7

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Aug–Sept

Mature size

Shrub 2–4 m; containerable

Light

Full sun to partial

Soil pH

6.0–7.0

Environment

Temperate

Native range

No wild range — an intergeneric hybrid of Aronia melanocarpa and Sorbus aucuparia, first described in 1906. The plant grown commercially is Michurin's 1930s selection 'Mitschurinii', backcrossed towards the Aronia side, and it is what most of the world's 'aronia' juice is actually pressed from. It has since naturalised invasively in Baltic and Scandinavian pine forest.

Status

Both wild and cultivated

Years to fruit

2–3 yrs

Growth speed

Moderate

Spacing

250 cm (98 in) apart — about 6.3 m² (67 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Simple, elliptic to obovate 5–9 cm, glossy dark green and finely toothed, with the row of tiny dark glands along the upper midrib that marks out Aronia; scarlet in autumn. The rowan half shows only occasionally, as a stray free leaflet at the base of a leaf.

Root system

Shallow, fibrous and suckering, spreading into a multi-stemmed clump. Grown on its own roots, so a sucker lifted with roots attached is simply a new plant.

Fruit description

Round black pomes 10–15 mm in flat clusters, noticeably larger than wild chokeberry, ripening from late summer. Very high in anthocyanins and correspondingly astringent — mouth-drying eaten raw, but excellent as juice, wine, syrup and jam, and used industrially as a natural colourant.

Propagation

Softwood cuttings, division of suckers, or seed — and seed is unusually dependable here, because the plant is a tetraploid apomict and its seedlings come essentially true to the parent.

Pollination

Self-fertile, tetraploid and apomictic — seed forms without fertilisation, so a single plant crops fully and its seedlings come near-identical to it.

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.