Zone 3 gallery
161 species in the database survive zone 3.
arctic kiwi
Actinidia kolomikta
Sweet-tart, smooth-skinned berries eaten whole — genuinely popular as a fresh fruit in Russia. Grown in the West at least as much for its striking pink/white/green variegated foliage as for its fruit.
American elder
Sambucus nigra subsp. canadensis
⚠ MUST BE COOKED — raw berries, leaves and stems are toxic. This is the elder native to eastern North America, forming dense, fast-spreading thickets along streams and forest edges; its dark purple-black berries, borne in broad, flat clusters up to 25 cm across, are the type most widely grown for elderberry syrup, wine and jam in the US.
squashberry / mooseberry
Viburnum edule
Fruit is a tart, juicy red drupe, edible raw once fully ripe — the flesh is pleasant but each has a large, flattened stone and a musky odor that some find off-putting, so it is more often cooked into jelly or sauce than eaten out of hand.
nannyberry
Viburnum lentago
Fruit ripens to a bluish-black, sweet, raisin-like pulp over a single flattened stone — good eaten fresh off the shrub once fully ripe, though the thick skin and large seed limit it mostly to jam, sauce, or leather.
guelder rose
Viburnum opulus
Fruit is bitter and mildly toxic raw, causing nausea or stomach upset if eaten in quantity — it needs cooking (as jelly or sauce) to be palatable, unlike the unrelated Sambucus elderberry, and birds eat it untroubled straight off the bush. ⚠ Raw fruit is mildly toxic — cook it.
blackhaw
Viburnum prunifolium
Genuinely edible raw, unlike most viburnums in this catalog — no cooking required and no known toxicity. Quality varies by individual plant: the best have thin, sweet, date- or prune-like flesh with a faint smoky note, while others lean bitter and astringent and are better suited to preserves. Best picked after the first frost, which sweetens it. Leaves have also been used for tea.
perennial onions
Allium spp.
Onion/garlic flavour; leaf and bulb. Welsh onion, chives, ramps.
fragrant sumac
Rhus aromatica
Sumac — a souring SPICE (lemony), not a dessert fruit. ⚠ Know your sumac: the red-fruited Rhus in this entry are safe, but poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix) is a wetland shrub with drooping WHITE fruit and causes severe dermatitis. Red and upright, fine; white and drooping, leave it.
smooth sumac
Rhus glabra
Sumac — a souring SPICE (lemony), not a dessert fruit. ⚠ Know your sumac: red upright fruit clusters are Rhus and safe; poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix) has drooping white fruit and causes severe dermatitis.
staghorn sumac
Rhus typhina
Sumac — a souring SPICE (lemony), not a dessert fruit. Tart red drupes for 'sumac-ade'; suckers freely. ⚠ Know your sumac: red upright fruit clusters are Rhus and safe; poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix) has drooping white fruit and causes severe dermatitis.
American spikenard
Aralia racemosa
Ripe berries, cooked, are used for jam or wine — sources genuinely disagree on how palatable they are raw, and eating a quantity of them raw can cause digestive upset, so cook them. The heavily aromatic root is not a food; it's used medicinally and, historically, as a root-beer flavoring.
asparagus
Asparagus officinalis
Young emerging spears eaten raw or cooked — the entire crop; grassy-sweet. ⚠ The red berries on female plants are not edible (mildly toxic) — only the spears are food.
false Solomon's seal
Maianthemum racemosum
Ripe red berries edible in moderation, cooked or as jelly — raw berries have a laxative, cathartic effect in quantity. Young shoots are cooked and eaten like asparagus in some regions. ⚠ Also worth knowing: young shoots are easily confused with those of the toxic false hellebore (Veratrum) — check for the alternate, distinctly parallel-veined leaves before cutting anything.
chicory
Cichorium intybus
Roots roasted and ground as a coffee substitute; forced blanched shoots (chicons) and young leaves eaten as a bitter salad or cooked green; flowers edible.
sunchoke / Jerusalem artichoke
Helianthus tuberosus
Sunchoke — nutty, sweet, crisp. Excellent, but notoriously gas-forming.
dandelion
Taraxacum officinale
Whole plant edible — young leaves as a bitter salad or cooked green, roots roasted as a coffee substitute, flowers used for wine and syrup.
common barberry
Berberis vulgaris
Sharp, tart — mostly for jelly; barberry dried as a spice. Sold dried in Persian cooking as zereshk, used whole in rice dishes like zereshk polo.
yellow birch
Betula alleghaniensis
Spring sap tapped for syrup — higher mineral content than sugar maple sap; prized alongside paper birch in North American sap traditions.
sweet / black birch
Betula lenta
Spring sap tapped for syrup, and classically for wintergreen-flavoured birch beer.
paper birch
Betula papyrifera
Spring sap tapped for syrup — the classic North American sap birch; under 1% sugar, but the sweetest of the birches here. A large volume of sap is needed per litre of syrup.
silver birch
Betula pendula
Spring sap tapped for syrup or drunk fresh — around 2.5% sugar; the standard European tapping birch.
downy birch
Betula pubescens
Spring sap tapped for syrup or drunk fresh — around 2.6% sugar, comparable to silver birch.
American hazelnut
Corylus americana
A thicket-forming, multi-stemmed native shrub of eastern North America, valued both for small sweet nuts and as a key breeding source of eastern filbert blight resistance for cold-hardy hazelnut cultivars.
beaked hazelnut
Corylus cornuta
North America's wild 'beaked' hazelnut, named for the long, bristly, tubular husk that encloses the nut — smaller-nutted than European hazelnut, with a thin shell and sweet, well-flavored kernel.
Asian / Siberian hazel
Corylus heterophylla
A cold-hardy, many-stemmed shrub of northeast Asian forests whose small, thin-shelled, sweet-flavored nuts — unusually for a hazel — fall free of their shallow, bell-shaped husks at ripeness; valued by breeders for its frequent resistance to eastern filbert blight.
beehive cactus
Escobaria vivipara
Small greenish fruit, edible but minor — grown mainly for the pink flowers rather than for the fruit.
brittle prickly pear
Opuntia fragilis
Prickly-pear fruit sweet and seedy; young pads as a vegetable. ⚠ Glochids.
hairspine prickly pear
Opuntia polyacantha
One of the most cold-hardy and widely distributed Opuntia in North America, ranging from Chihuahua, Mexico north through the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states into Alberta and Saskatchewan, with a disjunct population found in Ontario's Thousand Islands in 2018 — it is one of only two cactus species native to Canada. ⚠ Glochids.
common hackberry
Celtis occidentalis
Hackberry — thin, sweet, date-like pulp on a hard seed.
blue honeysuckle / honeyberry / haskap
Lonicera caerulea
Sweet-tart, blueberry-meets-raspberry — good fresh and processed. ⚠ Worth knowing at genus level: haskap is one of the few honeysuckles that is good to eat. Many Lonicera berries are emetic or toxic, so this is not a genus to forage on a family resemblance — identify to species.
mountain fly honeysuckle
Lonicera villosa
The North American mountain fly honeysuckle, and a genuine close relative of haskap — botanists still argue whether it is a separate species or a subspecies of Lonicera caerulea. Small blue berries, sweet-tart and edible like haskap, though smaller and borne more sparsely than the selected cultivars. ⚠ Worth knowing at genus level: this and haskap are among the few edible honeysuckles. Many Lonicera berries are emetic or toxic — identify to species rather than trusting the genus.
bunchberry
Cornus canadensis
⚠ Honestly: mild, faintly sweet, soft/mealy "pudding-berry" — pleasant but bland fresh; better cooked into jam or pudding. Grown as much as a groundcover as for fruit. Unripe berries may cause mild stomach upset; pulp and stone are hard to separate.
Russian olive
Elaeagnus angustifolia
Dry and mealy rather than juicy, but genuinely sweet once fully ripe — astringent if picked even slightly early. Eaten fresh once ripe, or made into jelly and preserves.
American silverberry
Elaeagnus commutata
The least palatable fresh-eating fruit of this catalog's Elaeagnus — dry, mealy and quite astringent unless fully ripe, and not particularly enjoyable raw even then. Birds take it readily; for people it's really a cooked fruit, used in jelly and soup, or historically fried in fat.
autumn olive
Elaeagnus umbellata
Goumi/autumn olive — pleasantly tart-sweet when fully ripe; good for jam.
sea buckthorn / seaberry
Hippophae rhamnoides
⚠ Intensely acidic — not fresh eating; for juice, oil and syrup. Very high vitamin C.
Tibetan sea buckthorn
Hippophae tibetana
⚠ Intensely acidic — not for fresh eating; juice, oil and syrup. Very high vitamin C.
silver buffaloberry
Shepherdia argentea
⚠ Honestly: bitter and saponin-rich — an acquired taste, poor fresh.
russet buffaloberry
Shepherdia canadensis
⚠ Honestly: bitter and saponin-rich; whipped into 'Indian ice cream' — an acquired taste, poor fresh.
bearberry
Arctostaphylos uva-ursi
Bearberry — dry and mealy; mostly for cooking.
crowberry
Empetrum nigrum
Crowberry — bland and watery; a famine/curiosity food.
wintergreen
Gaultheria procumbens
Wintergreen — medicinal/methyl-salicylate flavour; a curiosity. ⚠ The berries and a light leaf tea are fine, but wintergreen essential oil is a different matter: it is concentrated methyl salicylate and is genuinely toxic in small amounts, especially to children. Do not treat the oil as a flavouring.
black huckleberry
Gaylussacia baccata
Blueberry sweet; lingonberry/cranberry tart (cook); bilberry intense but tiny.
lowbush blueberry
Vaccinium angustifolium
The true wild blueberry of Maine and Atlantic Canada — smaller-fruited and more intensely flavored than highbush, traditionally harvested from sprawling rhizome colonies ("barrens") rather than grown as individual planted bushes.
northern highbush blueberry
Vaccinium corymbosum
The dominant commercial blueberry worldwide — most supermarket blueberries are highbush cultivars or their hybrids. Large, sweet-tart fruit with the classic dusty-blue bloom on the skin.
American cranberry
Vaccinium macrocarpon
The commercial cranberry — tart, firm, red berries grown on sandy, highly acidic bogs and almost always eaten cooked or processed rather than raw. Bogs are flooded for harvest and frost protection, not because the plant is aquatic.
mountain huckleberry
Vaccinium membranaceum
The classic wild-harvested huckleberry of the Pacific Northwest, prized for large, dark purple-black, well-flavored fruit — and prized specifically because it can't be reliably farmed; nearly all of it is hand-picked from wild stands.
European bilberry
Vaccinium myrtillus
A wild European heathland fruit with a long culinary and folk tradition — eaten raw with cream or made into jams, tarts and Sweden's blåbärssoppa (bilberry soup); its dark, staining juice is more intensely flavored than cultivated blueberry.
oval-leaf blueberry
Vaccinium ovalifolium
A boreal and subalpine wild blueberry of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, forming dense thickets; the fruit is mildly tart yet sweet and dries to a raisin-like flavor — an important wild food though little grown.
European cranberry
Vaccinium oxycoccos
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.
Kamchatka cranberry
Vaccinium praestans
A low, creeping shrub from the Russian Far East and Japan with unusually large, sweet, fragrant fruit for the genus — rare in cultivation, introduced to the West by the plant-hunter Ernest Wilson in 1914.
bog bilberry
Vaccinium uliginosum
A circumboreal arctic-alpine bilberry, historically the most popular foraged fruit for Native communities around Fort Yukon, Alaska; blue-black berries with a bluish bloom, used in jams, jellies and pies.
lingonberry
Vaccinium vitis-idaea
Lingonberry — sharply tart, classically served as a jam or sauce with Scandinavian meatballs, pork or game; its unusually high benzoic acid content gives it a long shelf life that made it a valued preserved fruit long before refrigeration.
groundnut
Apios americana
Starchy tubers cooked (boiled, roasted, fried) — a nutty, potato-like staple with roughly three times potato's protein; young pods, shoots and flowers also edible cooked. Tubers best harvested autumn to spring after 2+ seasons; borne like beads strung along the rhizome.
Siberian pea shrub
Caragana arborescens
⚠ Honestly: young seeds and pods are edible cooked but bland — an emergency/fallback food and poultry fodder rather than a treat. Cook the seeds (reported to contain the amino-acid analogue L-canavanine; eat in moderation); nitrogen-fixing.
American beech
Fagus grandifolia
Triangular beechnuts edible, sweet, between pine nut and almond — best lightly roasted; the oil can be pressed. ⚠ Raw beechnuts contain fagin and oxalic acid; eating many raw can cause headache and nausea — eat only in moderation or roast.
white oak
Quercus alba
Acorns edible after leaching out bitter tannins; white oak acorns are naturally sweeter and lower in tannin than red oaks, needing less leaching.
bur oak
Quercus macrocarpa
Acorns edible only after leaching out bitter tannins in water, then ground into flour or roasted. Bur oak is in the low-tannin white-oak group and among the easiest, sweetest acorns.
alpine currant
Ribes alpinum
Fruit is red and translucent like a redcurrant but bland and insipid — this is grown almost entirely as a tough, shearable ornamental hedge shrub, not for eating.
American blackcurrant
Ribes americanum
A true wild black currant of eastern and central North America — smooth, low-fat, high-sugar berries used historically for jam, jelly and pie.
American gooseberry
Ribes hirtellum
The wild parent of nearly all North American gooseberry cultivars — smooth-skinned fruit, smaller than European types but hardier and healthier, good fresh or in jam and pie.
Hudson Bay currant
Ribes hudsonianum
Black fruit that's notably bitter eaten raw — worth growing for jam and jelly rather than fresh eating.
blackcurrant
Ribes nigrum
The genus's single most economically important species — source of cassis and crème de cassis, and the base fruit for Ribena and blackcurrant juice/cordial. Fruit is small, black and glossy, with a bold, musky flavor much better cooked than eaten raw; very high in vitamin C and anthocyanins.
Canada gooseberry
Ribes oxyacanthoides
A small, spiny, very cold-hardy wild gooseberry of boreal and northern prairie regions, historically used by Indigenous peoples and early settlers — its flavor is thinly documented compared to cultivated gooseberry types.
redcurrant
Ribes rubrum
The classic tart, translucent red currant — too acidic to eat fresh in quantity for most people, but prized for jelly, jam, syrup, sauces (cumberland sauce) and baking. A real commercial soft-fruit crop across northern and central Europe.
northern redcurrant
Ribes triste
A cold-hardy, wetland-loving wild red currant found across boreal North America and northeast Asia — tart fruit used for pies and preserves, and historically valuable to breeders for introducing cold-hardiness into cultivated redcurrant lines. Genuinely thin on culinary documentation compared to R. rubrum.
gooseberry
Ribes uva-crispa
The classic European dessert and culinary gooseberry — tart to sweet depending on ripeness and cultivar, used underripe for cooking (pies, fools, sauces for oily fish) and fully ripe for fresh eating. Distinct from American gooseberry cultivars (bred mostly from R. hirtellum), which are smaller, hardier and milder-flavored.
jostaberry
Ribes × nidigrolaria
A deliberately bred German hybrid — blackcurrant (R. nigrum) × European gooseberry (R. uva-crispa) × the wild American coastal black gooseberry (R. divaricatum), whose genes were key to overcoming the cross's initial sterility. Bred by Paul Lorenz from 1926 at Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; Rudolf Bauer achieved a fertile line using colchicine-induced tetraploidy and released the first cultivar, 'Josta', in 1977 (the name is a portmanteau of German Johannisbeere/currant and Stachelbeere/gooseberry). Fruit is blackcurrant-sized or larger, dark purple-black, with a flavor between the two parents — less musky than blackcurrant, juicier and milder than gooseberry.
butternut
Juglans cinerea
Butternut is the true 'white walnut,' prized for its sweet, oily nutmeat, but it is now one of North America's most endangered trees — an introduced fungus, butternut canker, has killed the majority of wild trees since the 1960s with no cure available, making surviving canker-tolerant individuals and butternut × Japanese walnut ('buartnut') hybrids a conservation priority.
Manchurian walnut
Juglans mandshurica
Manchurian walnut is the cold-hardiest of the commonly grown walnuts, native to the forests of Manchuria, the Russian Far East and Korea, and it is prized in breeding and rootstock programs for passing on cold tolerance and disease resistance to cultivated walnuts, alongside its own thick-shelled, oil-rich nuts.
sweetfern
Comptonia peregrina
Not a fruit crop — an aromatic shrub whose leaves make a herbal tea; it bears a small bur-like nutlet, not a fleshy edible fruit. Leaves for tea; nitrogen-fixing. Distinct from the related Myrica/Morella (yangmei), which has the edible fruit.
Swiss stone pine
Pinus cembra
Swiss stone pine seeds are small (8–12 mm) but rich and nutty — harvested regionally in the Alps for confectionery and liqueurs (notably in South Tyrol) rather than sold internationally as a commodity nut the way the related Italian stone pine is.
Korean pine
Pinus koraiensis
Korean pine is the pine nut of everyday commerce — the main species behind the pine nuts sold internationally out of China, Russia and North Korea (together over 60% of the global supply), wild-collected from natural stands and largely processed for export in northeastern China.
Siberian dwarf pine
Pinus pumila
Siberian dwarf pine is a low, shrubby, extremely cold-hardy species — its seeds are edible, oily and nutritious, but harvested only locally and casually in Siberia and Japan rather than traded commercially like its larger pine relatives.
Siberian pine
Pinus sibirica
Siberian pine — called kedr (cedar) in Russia and a genuine source of national pride — produces the seeds pressed into prized Siberian 'cedar nut' oil, noted for one of the highest pinolenic acid contents of any pine nut; wild stands crop unpredictably, with a good harvest only about once every four years.
rhubarb
Rheum rhabarbarum
⚠ STALKS ONLY — the leaf blades are toxic (soluble oxalates and anthraquinone glycosides) and must never be eaten; only the leaf stalks (petioles) are food, and they are cooked. Sharp and superb. Herbaceous, and its vernalization requirement differs from fruit-tree chill.
perennial sorrel
Rumex acetosa
Sharp, lemony leaves eaten raw in salad when young or cooked into soups and sauces — the acidity is oxalic acid, the same compound that makes rhubarb stalks sharp. Fine in normal culinary amounts; worth moderating if you are prone to kidney stones, and not a green to eat by the bowlful. Cooked sorrel collapses to a khaki purée in seconds, which is normal.
saskatoon berry
Amelanchier alnifolia
Saskatoon — sweet, blueberry-like with a distinct almond note. Very good.
Canadian serviceberry
Amelanchier canadensis
Amelanchier canadensis is a wetland-adapted, strongly colony-forming shrub of the Atlantic coastal plain, distinct from the more upland, tree-form A. arborea and A. laevis it is frequently confused with in the nursery trade — its vigorous suckering habit makes it especially useful for naturalizing along pond and stream margins.
Amelanchier × Sorbus hybrid
Amelasorbus jackii
Small pome between serviceberry and rowan; mild, sweet-astringent. ⚠ 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.
Amelanchier × Sorbus hybrid
Amelasorbus raciborskiana
Small pome; mild, sweet-astringent. ⚠ 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.
black chokeberry
Aronia melanocarpa
⚠ Very astringent raw — best processed into juice, wine or jam.
fireberry hawthorn
Crataegus chrysocarpa
Fireberry hawthorn is a cold-hardy, multi-stemmed shrub of northern North America, notable for its early-ripening, showy orange-red fruit and its status as the most common hawthorn across much of its range, including Minnesota, where it typically colonizes forest edges and open brushy ground.
Japanese strawberry
Fragaria iinumae
A diploid, hermaphroditic wild strawberry from the mountains of Japan and southern Sakhalin; along with woodland strawberry, it's one of the two diploid ancestral species behind the cultivated garden strawberry, and genetically the earliest-diverging lineage among the diploid Fragaria species.
eastern Asian strawberry
Fragaria orientalis
A cold-hardy wild strawberry native to Siberia, the Russian Far East, Mongolia, Korea and northern China, valued by breeders for frost tolerance and aromatic fruit; unlike the strongly dioecious musk strawberry, its flowers are typically bisexual and self-fertile.
woodland / wild strawberry
Fragaria vesca
The woodland strawberry bears small (~15 mm) but intensely aromatic fruit and is the most widely naturalized wild strawberry species worldwide; cultivated in European gardens since at least Roman times, long before the modern garden strawberry existed.
Virginia strawberry
Fragaria virginiana
Native to eastern and central North America, and one of the two wild species — alongside the South American beach strawberry — whose 18th-century hybridization in Europe produced the modern garden strawberry.
garden strawberry
Fragaria × ananassa
Not a wild species but an 18th-century hybrid of the South American beach strawberry and the North American Virginia strawberry, first arising in Brittany, France — virtually all commercial strawberries grown today descend from this original cross.
Siberian crabapple
Malus baccata
The Siberian crabapple is among the coldest-hardy and most disease-resistant species in the genus, valued both as an ornamental (fragrant white flowers, cherry-sized red-to-yellow fruit in dense clusters) and as a foundational genetic resource — its cold tolerance and broad disease resistance make it a common parent in breeding programs for hardy apple cultivars and rootstocks in northern climates.
apple
Malus domestica
The familiar eating apple is a hybrid-origin fruit tree descended mainly from the wild Central Asian apple Malus sieversii, refined over millennia of selection and grafting into thousands of named cultivars that vary enormously in flavor, texture, and use — from sharp cooking apples to sweet dessert varieties — with virtually all of that variation dependent on which cultivar is grafted rather than on the species itself.
prairie crabapple
Malus ioensis
Prairie crabapple is a thicket-forming native of the American tallgrass prairie region, distinguished from most other Malus species here by its tendency to sucker from the roots, and prized horticulturally for intensely fragrant spring blossom — the double-flowered selection 'Bechtel's Crab' was a popular 19th- and early-20th-century dooryard tree grown specifically for its fragrance.
plum-leaf crabapple
Malus prunifolia
Known as plum-leaf or Chinese crabapple, this hardy small tree bears yellow-to-red pomes to about 2 cm across that are edible but typically mealy and astringent, though some forms and individual specimens have been recorded with a sweet, pleasant taste — it has long served in China as a rootstock for grafted apple.
European crabapple
Malus sylvestris
The true wild crabapple of Europe, found in hedgerows and oak woodland on neutral-to-calcareous soils, its small, hard, intensely sour fruit was traditionally pressed into verjuice — a medieval souring agent used the way lemon juice is today — and is still used for crabapple jelly, its flavor improving markedly once the fruit has been frosted.
cherry prinsepia
Prinsepia sinensis
Red, juicy fruit with a pleasant, slightly tart, cherry-like flavor — eaten out of hand or made into jam, juice and pies. Extremely cold-hardy. ⚠ Kernels cyanogenic, as with other stone fruit in the rose family.
hedge prinsepia
Prinsepia uniflora
Small cherry-like drupes, red or purple-black depending on the plant — a close relative of P. sinensis but far less documented for flavor, grown more as a tough, spiny hedging shrub in its cold, arid native range than as a fruit crop. ⚠ Kernels cyanogenic, as with other stone fruit in the rose family.
sweet cherry
Prunus avium
Sweet, juicy fresh-eating flavor in cultivated forms — from firm and mild to deep and richly flavored — while the wild type's smaller, more bitter fruit is traditionally distilled into kirsch and maraschino liqueur. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
sour / tart cherry
Prunus cerasus
Tart, acidic flavor unsuited to fresh eating for most people but prized for pies, preserves, juice, and dried cherries — Montmorency is the archetypal culinary sour cherry. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
European dwarf / steppe cherry
Prunus fruticosa
Fruit is harshly tart and acidic — rarely eaten out of hand, but valued cooked or sweetened for jams, jellies, pies, and cherry liqueurs. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
Amur chokecherry
Prunus maackii
The small black cherries are astringent and rarely eaten out of hand, but are gathered for jams, jellies, and wine, and are an important late-summer food source for birds. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
Manchurian apricot
Prunus mandshurica
Wild-type fruit is small, dry, and sour to slightly bitter, but seedling trees vary widely and some produce sweet, juicy, apricot-flavored fruit good for fresh eating, jams, and preserves. ⚠ As with other apricots, the kernels are cyanogenic and should not be eaten raw.
bird cherry
Prunus padus
The small black cherries are very bitter and astringent raw, but are traditionally cooked into jams, syrups, and flavored spirits once sweetened. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
pin cherry
Prunus pensylvanica
The small, sour cherries are too tart for most fresh eating but are traditionally cooked down into jams, jellies, and syrups, and are an important food source for dozens of bird species as well as small mammals and bears. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
black cherry
Prunus serotina
⚠ Ripe black cherries are bittersweet with thin skin and dark juicy flesh, traditionally used to flavor whiskey (cherry bounce) and in jams, syrups, and baking — wilted leaves, bark, and seeds are cyanogenic (the ripe flesh itself is edible).
Siberian apricot
Prunus sibirica
The flesh is thin, dry, and sour to the point of being barely palatable fresh, so the species is grown mainly for its almond-flavored kernel, pressed for oil, and as extremely cold-hardy apricot breeding stock — ⚠ kernels are bitter and cyanogenic if eaten raw in quantity.
Nanking cherry
Prunus tomentosa
⚠ Fruit ranges from sweet to tart depending on the seedling and ripens earlier than most cherries, often by June; eaten fresh or made into pies, jellies, and wine — pits are cyanogenic like other Prunus stones.
flowering almond
Prunus triloba
Grown as an ornamental for its double pink spring blossom; the small red fruits are edible but thin-fleshed and mild, and are rarely eaten since the popular double-flowered cultivars are sterile and don't fruit at all. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
chokecherry
Prunus virginiana
Fruit is very astringent and bitter fresh off the tree but transforms into good jelly, syrup, and wine once cooked with sugar, and was historically pounded whole into pemmican by Plains peoples — ⚠ seeds, bark, and wilted leaves are cyanogenic.
Ussurian pear
Pyrus ussuriensis
Pyrus ussuriensis, the Ussurian or Harbin pear, is valued far more as an extremely cold-hardy breeding parent and rootstock than for its own fruit, which is typically small, hard and only modestly palatable. It is a direct ancestor of cultivated Asian pears and remains the standard source of hardiness genes for pear breeding in cold-winter regions.
arctic rose
Rosa acicularis
Arctic rose is the most cold-hardy of the six species here, native well into the boreal and Arctic zone. Its hips are modest in size and thin-fleshed compared with rugosa or villosa, but they were a genuine traditional food source for northern peoples, eaten fresh after frost or dried for tea and winter stores. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.
prairie rose
Rosa arkansana
Prairie rose is a small, tough, deep-rooted species of the North American plains, dying back to the crown each winter. Its hips are small and thin-fleshed compared with rugosa or villosa — closer in character to arctic rose's — valued historically more for jelly, tea, and wildlife forage than for thick preserving flesh. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.
dog rose
Rosa canina
Dog rose is the classic European wild rose whose hips built the tradition of rosehip syrup — it was the backbone of Britain's wartime vitamin C supply. Hips are thin-fleshed and tart rather than richly fleshy, so they are processed into syrup, jelly, or tea rather than eaten as fresh fruit.
rugosa rose
Rosa rugosa
Rugosa rose produces the largest, fleshiest, best-tasting hips of the six species here, genuinely excellent for jam and syrup, and is also the most disease-resistant rose in the group. Its strong suckering habit is a double edge — a useful trait for stabilizing sandy ground, but also the reason it has become an invasive coastal weed in parts of Europe and North America outside its native range. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.
Allegheny blackberry
Rubus allegheniensis
One of the best wild American blackberries — sweet, aromatic, good fresh and cooked.
arctic raspberry / nagoonberry
Rubus arcticus
A dwarf, thornless groundcover raspberry of arctic and boreal bogs and clearings, spreading by rhizomes into low mats rarely more than 20–30 cm tall. The fruit is a small aggregate of 10–30 deep-red to dark-purple drupelets with a distinctive pineapple-like aroma — prized across Scandinavia for jam and for mesimarja, a liqueur made from the berries since 1882. It is also a parent, alongside red raspberry, of the hybrid "nectar raspberries" bred for garden use in Scandinavia and Scotland.
cloudberry
Rubus chamaemorus
Cloudberry is a genus outlier in almost every respect — a low, unbranched, non-prickly perennial of cold bogs rather than a caned bramble, it is dioecious (needing separate male and female plants, unlike the mostly self-fertile Rubus genus) and demands acidic, waterlogged peat rather than ordinary garden soil. It is culturally significant across Scandinavia — served with cheese in Finland, as a dessert topping in Sweden (where it is nicknamed "Norrland's gold"), and as moltekrem (cloudberry cream) in Norway — and appears on Finland's two-euro coin.
northern dewberry
Rubus flagellaris
Sweet-tart, blackberry-like, seedy; good fresh, small crop.
red raspberry
Rubus idaeus
Excellent fresh.
black raspberry
Rubus occidentalis
The 'blackcap' — readily told apart from other brambles by canes coated in a powdery, whitish-blue bloom and by fruit that ripens through white, then red, before finally turning black-purple. Flavor is rich and more intense than red raspberry, good fresh but especially prized for jams, syrups, and pies. Unusual among brambles for tolerating black walnut's juglone. The trade-off is disease susceptibility — it is markedly more vulnerable than red raspberry to both orange rust and verticillium wilt, so site it away from old bramble patches and recent nightshade-family beds.
flowering raspberry
Rubus odoratus
Grown primarily as an ornamental for its large magenta flowers rather than for its fruit — the berries are edible but notably dry, crumbly and seedy, usually cooked into jam or preserves rather than eaten fresh, and extension sources describe them plainly as unappetizing.
thimbleberry
Rubus parviflorus
Produces a soft, thimble-shaped aggregate fruit — the ripe drupelets lift off the receptacle as a hollow cap, giving the fruit (and the plant) its name — that is tart to pleasantly sweet but very seedy and too soft to ship, so it is grown as a garden or native/restoration plant rather than for commercial fruit.
stone bramble
Rubus saxatilis
⚠ Honestly: only 2–6 large translucent red drupelets per fruit — sharply acidic, more curiosity than crop; used for cordial in Scandinavia.
American red raspberry
Rubus strigosus
A true red raspberry — sweet-tart, softer and smaller than the European; excellent fresh. Frequently treated as R. idaeus subsp. strigosus.
Sorbus × Aronia hybrid (cvs 'Fallax', 'Saule')
Sorbaronia
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.
American mountain ash
Sorbus americana
American mountain ash is a small, hardy boreal tree whose bright red berries are famous winter wildlife food for birds, bears and browsing moose and deer rather than a mainstream human food — the raw fruit is thin-fleshed, sour and heavily tannic, and only becomes reliably edible for people after the first hard freeze softens and sweetens it, when it can be used for pies and jelly. ⚠ 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.
rowan / mountain ash
Sorbus aucuparia
Rowan — also called mountain ash — is famous for berries that are far too astringent and acidic to eat raw in any quantity; British tradition instead cooks them, often after a frost or a spell in the freezer to break down the bitter parasorbic acid, into the classic tart preserve rowan jelly, along with compotes, chutneys and syrups.
partridgeberry
Mitchella repens
⚠ Honestly: bland, nearly tasteless — a curiosity. Evergreen groundcover.
common prickly-ash
Zanthoxylum americanum
Citrus as familiar. ⚠ Zanthoxylum = a numbing SPICE (husks), not a fruit. Clove-scented spice drupes.
red maple
Acer rubrum
Spring sap tapped for syrup, sweeter than the birches but less sweet than sugar maple.
sugar maple
Acer saccharum
Spring sap boiled down to maple syrup — the classic sugar maple, all-sucrose and among the sweetest tappable saps.
American bladdernut
Staphylea trifolia
Pistachio-like edible seeds in papery rattling pods.
Amur grape
Vitis amurensis
Amur grape is grown mainly as a genetic source of extreme cold hardiness and disease resistance for grape breeding rather than as a fresh-eating fruit — its wild-tart, deep blue-black berries are more often pressed for juice, wine or preserves than eaten out of hand.
riverbank grape
Vitis riparia
One of the most cold-hardy grape species on Earth — some vines survive to about -57°C (-71°F) — and thanks to that hardiness plus resistance to phylloxera and powdery mildew, it has been the key rootstock and breeding parent behind cold-climate hybrid wine grapes such as Frontenac, Marechal Foch and Baco Noir. ⚠ Know the look-alike: across eastern and central North America, moonseed (Menispermum canadense) twines alongside wild grapes, carries similar dark hanging clusters, and is potentially fatal. Three checks — a grape has 2–4 rounded, pear-shaped seeds while moonseed has ONE flat crescent seed; a grape climbs by forked tendrils and moonseed has none; a grape's leaves are toothed and moonseed's are not. Open a berry and look at the seed before eating any wild grape.
Fleshy hawthorn
Crataegus succulenta
The most wide-ranging hawthorn in North America, from southern Canada south to Arizona and New Mexico — a testament to how adaptable it is. Unlike several relatives here, it doesn't sucker or colonize, staying a well-behaved single clump.
Crowberry
Empetrum hermaphroditum
The hermaphrodite crowberry — the arctic-alpine counterpart of common crowberry, and the reason it fruits where nothing pollinates reliably: each flower carries both sexes, so a single plant sets a crop. Black berries about 7.5mm, watery and mildly acid, much improved by frost and long a staple of Arctic diets.
American plum
Prunus americana
The American plum — the hardiest plum in this catalogue and the backbone of prairie shelterbelts. Fruit about 25mm, succulent and juicy but rather acid with a tough skin; the better selections are pulpy and genuinely pleasant fresh, and all of it cooks and preserves well.
Beach plum
Prunus maritima
The beach plum, a true coastal-dune shrub that takes salt wind head-on. Fruit about 15mm, purple-black, and very variable between bushes — sub-acid to sweet — which is why the wild stands are picked selectively and named selections matter. A classic jelly fruit of the north-east American coast.
Canada plum
Prunus nigra
Extremely cold-hardy, one of the toughest plums here. Fruit is small, thick-skinned and sour off the tree — a few hard frosts improve the flavour tremendously, so this is a plum worth leaving on the tree into late season. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
Sand cherry
Prunus pumila
A genuine dune and beach plant, native almost exclusively to sandy, gravelly ground around the Great Lakes. Rich, pleasantly acid flavour once fully ripe, sometimes slightly bitter — good eaten out of hand as well as preserved. ⚠ Kernels/pits cyanogenic.
Western sand cherry
Prunus pumila besseyi
Reportedly hardy to about -50°C dormant — as tough as the toughest plums in this catalog. Rates among the better-flavoured sand cherries, sweetish fresh and making a tasty, slightly astringent jelly. ⚠ Kernels/pits and shoots cyanogenic — eat seeds only if sweet-tasting, never bitter.
Dryland pear
Pyrus xerophila
One of the toughest pears there is: reportedly hardy to about -37°C and strongly drought-tolerant, described by one specialty grower as among the most rugged species they carry. Probably a natural hybrid of Himalayan pear (P. pashia), Manchurian pear (P. ussuriensis) and domestic pear that arose along Silk Road trade routes. Grown as rootstock more often than for its own small, hard, olive-sized fruit, though it is eaten locally in China.
Mountain gooseberry
Ribes montigenum
A true high-mountain species, found from about 2,400 m up to alpine elevations among rocky talus and conifer bases across the western US. Fruit ripens from green to reddish-purple; edible but not as tasty as most other currants — more of a survival forage than a dessert fruit.
Smooth rose
Rosa blanda
Unusually thornless or near-thornless for a wild rose — an easier plant to work around than most of the genus. Hips are a good vitamin C source, best cooked into jam or syrup rather than eaten raw. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.
Cinnamon rose
Rosa majalis
One of the hardiest roses grown, reportedly to about -35°C — a genuinely northern species reaching deep into Scandinavia and Siberia. Named for cinnamon-scented bark rather than the fruit.
Burnet rose
Rosa spinosissima
Distinctive among roses for its round, deep purple-black hips rather than the usual red or orange. A tough coastal and heathland species — genuinely drought- and salt-tolerant — also known as Rosa pimpinellifolia and, in Scotland, Scotch or Scottish rose. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.
Virginia rose
Rosa virginiana
One of the better roses for eastern North American gardens generally, not just for the hips — foliage turns purple to red-orange to yellow in fall, unusually good color for the genus. Also salt-tolerant enough for coastal planting. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.
Wood's rose
Rosa woodsii
One of the most widely distributed roses in North America, reaching from Alaska to northern Mexico. Forms dense, thorny thickets by suckering — good wildlife cover and erosion control, less good in a small garden. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.
Smooth blackberry
Rubus canadensis
Also called American dewberry — unusual among brambles for being genuinely thornless, with almost completely smooth stems. One of the most highly regarded wild blackberries for flavour: sweet, juicy, richly flavoured, up to 2.5 cm long.
Swamp dewberry
Rubus hispidus
Also called bristly dewberry — a true creeping groundcover rather than an upright bramble, semi-evergreen and rooting wherever the stem tips touch soil. Fruit is edible but sour, better cooked than eaten fresh.
Bristly blackberry
Rubus setosus
Lives up to its name: 150 to 1,200 bristles per square inch on the canes, among the prickliest brambles going. More a wetland-margin plant than the drier thickets most Rubus here favour.
Red elderberry
Sambucus racemosa
The raw fruit, seeds, bark, leaves and roots all contain cyanogenic glycosides and are toxic raw — unlike black elderberry (S. nigra), even the ripe fruit needs cooking before eating, which destroys the toxins and also improves the flavor. Never eat this one raw off the bush. ⚠ Never eat this one raw.
Northern mountain ash
Sorbus decora
Also called showy mountain ash — one of the hardiest rowans here, native well into Labrador. Shiny red fruit clusters persist after leaf drop, an important winter and early-spring food source for birds. ⚠ 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.
Mapleleaf viburnum
Viburnum acerifolium
Fruit is thin-fleshed and mostly seed — edible and historically eaten by Indigenous peoples and early settlers, but sparse and not a substantial food source; grown more for understory cover and fall color than for the crop.
Wild raisin
Viburnum cassinoides
The common name is literal: as the fruit dries on the shrub in autumn it shrivels and sweetens like a raisin, with a date-like flavor once fully ripe. Now treated by many taxonomists as Viburnum nudum var. cassinoides, a variety of the wider-ranging possumhaw viburnum rather than a fully distinct species.
Arrowwood
Viburnum dentatum
Fruit is bitter and dry-fleshed, eaten mainly by birds — not a species grown for the crop, though historically the straight young stems (hence "arrowwood") were used by Indigenous peoples for arrow shafts.
Hobblebush
Viburnum lantanoides
Fruit is edible fresh once fully dark and soft, with a sweet-tart date-like flavor, though thin-fleshed with a large stone. The common name comes from its sprawling, arching branches, which root where they touch the ground and can trip ("hobble") a walker in dense thickets.
American highbush cranberry
Viburnum trilobum
The true North American highbush cranberry — not a true cranberry (Vaccinium) at all despite the name, but a viburnum that converges on the same bright-red, acidic fruit. Tart and cranberry-like, excellent for jelly and sauce, and it improves markedly after the first hard frost; raw fruit can still cause mild stomach upset if eaten unripe or in quantity. This catalog previously carried it twice, the second time under Viburnum opulus var. americanum — see the note where that entry used to be.
Siberian ginseng
Eleutherococcus senticosus
Better known as a root used in traditional medicine and supplements than as food, though young shoots are eaten locally as a spring green and the small dark berries are edible. Not a true ginseng (Panax) despite the common name — a different genus in the same family.
Northern bayberry
Myrica pensylvanica
The leaves are the crop here, not the berries: dried, they are a documented bay-leaf substitute, used the same way and removed before serving. The fruit is edible but there is very little flesh on it and that flesh is poor, so it is used to flavour soups rather than eaten — the grey wax coating it is what the plant has always really been grown for, boiled off to make bayberry candles. Note that constituents of that wax have been reported as possibly carcinogenic, which is a further reason the berries belong in the pot as a seasoning to be strained out, not in a bowl. Much hardier than its southern relative wax myrtle (zone 3 against zone 7), and the two overlap on the mid-Atlantic coast.
Bog myrtle
Myrica gale
The sweet-resinous leaves and small waxy fruit are used as a flavoring, most historically in beer before hops largely took over that role, and the crushed foliage doubles as an insect repellent. Sources genuinely disagree on the cold-hardiness floor, from zone 2 to zone 5 depending on the source — a wide-ranging boreal wetland shrub, so this catalog takes the more generous end, but treat zone 2-3 survival as less certain than the fully-sourced zone 5-7 core of its range.
Buckwheat
Fagopyrum esculentum
Not a true cereal grass despite the name and use — a relative of rhubarb and sorrel, grown for its starchy, gluten-free triangular seeds, ground into flour for soba noodles, blini and buckwheat pancakes. Also grown as a fast, weed-smothering cover crop and bee forage.
Horseradish
Armoracia rusticana
Grated fresh root is intensely pungent — the sharp, sinus-clearing heat comes from the same class of compounds (glucosinolates) as mustard and wasabi, and fades quickly once cut or ground, so it's prepared close to serving. Extremely persistent once planted: even a small piece of root left in the ground will regrow.