Photo: Bruce Marlin — CC BY-SA 2.5 · source
Survives zone 5 through 7
Harvest calendar
Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.
Grown for its ornamental white or crimson-pink fruit on bright red stalks rather than for eating — like other rowans, the raw fruit is mealy and astringent and needs cooking into jelly, or a hard frost, before it's palatable. ⚠ 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 5–7
- Habit
- Tree
- Edible part
- Fruit
- Ripens
- Summer–autumn
- Mature size
- Small tree 5–8 m, neat and upright
- Light
- Full sun to partial
- Soil pH
- 6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)
- Environment
- Montane
- Native range
- Central and western China — from Shaanxi west to Gansu and Qinghai, south to Yunnan, and east to Jiangxi and Shandong — growing on forest margins, in thickets, and along riverbanks, with some records extending into upper Burma and the Mishmi Hills of Assam.
- Status
- Ornamental
- Years to fruit
- 2–4 yrs
- Growth speed
- Slow to moderate — typically taking 10–20 years to reach its mature size of roughly 4–8 m in height and spread.
- Spacing
- 500 cm (197 in) apart — about 25 m² (269 sq ft) per plant
- Leaf shape
- Pinnately compound, 10–15 cm long, with 4–8 pairs of narrow oblong-to-elliptic leaflets that turn orange, yellow, or red in autumn.
- Root system
- Heart-root system typical of the genus — a short taproot dividing at the crown into several spreading lateral roots — with no suckering habit.
- Fruit description
- Small globose pomes about 5–8 mm across, in a white-fruited form (often flushed pink at the tip) and a crimson-pink form, held on brilliant red stalks and persisting for months after leaf fall — like other rowans, the raw fruit is mealy and astringent and needs cooking into jelly or jam, or bletting/frost-softening, to be palatable.
- Propagation
- By seed, which — as with most Sorbus — needs cold stratification and can germinate slowly and unevenly; the ornamental pink- and white-fruited forms grown in gardens are usually increased true-to-type by softwood cuttings in early summer, chip-budding in summer, or grafting in winter rather than by 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. Grows best in moderately fertile, humus-rich soil — established trees need little routine feeding, though a spring mulch of compost or well-rotted manure benefits young trees on poor ground.
How it spreads. A single-trunked small tree that spreads only by bird-dispersed seed — no suckering is reported for this species.
Growing tips. Grown partly as an ornamental outside its native range for its notably colorful fruit — small globose pomes in white or crimson-pink forms held on bright red stalks well into winter — and for orange-to-red autumn foliage color.
Grow journal
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