European cranberry

Photo: Christian Fischer — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source

Survives zone 2 through 6

Harvest calendar

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

A wild, circumboreal bog cranberry — the smaller-fruited European counterpart of the commercially grown American cranberry (V. macrocarpon), foraged across Northern and Eastern Europe and used the same way, in preserves and sauces.

Hardiness

Zone 2–6

Habit

Groundcover

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

July–Sept

Mature size

Slender creeping evergreen only a few cm tall, with wiry stems 10–40 cm long threading through Sphagnum

Light

Full sun (open bog)

Soil pH

2.9–7.5 depending on substrate — bog sites run as low as pH 2.9–4.7, while fen sites (where it also grows) run pH 6.0–7.5; the widest pH tolerance in the genus, provided the substrate stays consistently wet

Environment

Boreal to temperate bog

Native range

Circumboreal — northern Europe, Asia and North America in subarctic and temperate bogs, absent from the Canadian Arctic Archipelago; in North America south to California's Cascades, the Appalachians of West Virginia, and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Minnesota.

Status

Wild

Years to fruit

2–3 yrs

Growth speed

Fast-spreading once established — rhizome sprouting after disturbance can raise stem density more than twentyfold within months.

Spacing

100 cm (39 in) apart — about 1 m² (11 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Small, lance-shaped, leathery evergreen leaves (to ~1.2 cm) with rolled-under margins.

Root system

Shallow, fibrous, rhizomatous roots confined mostly to the living sphagnum moss layer; a classic bog/fen plant needing permanently saturated, acidic peat.

Fruit description

Small (~6 mm), shiny dark red berries, juicy and high in pectin, sharply tart — considered superior in flavor to related cranberries — and often persisting on the plant through winter without rotting.

Propagation

Mainly vegetative — softwood cuttings in late spring, semi-ripe cuttings in early summer, or layering a trailing stem into the soil; seedlings are rare in the wild.

Pollination

Self-fertile, better with a 2nd cultivar

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.