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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-464
Aronia Purple
Aronia x prunifolia
Purple chokeberry is a naturally occurring hybrid between red and black chokeberry, native to the eastern United States from Maine south to Georgia and west to Wisconsin and Illinois. Its purple-black fruit is too astringent to eat off the bush, so it gets cooked into jam, jelly, juice or syrup, or traditionally dried and worked into pemmican. Because it is a hybrid it won't come true from seed, so cuttings or divisions of a known plant are the reliable way to propagate it. It suckers from the roots into a spreading thicket on damp, low-lying ground, tolerates both wet and dry soil once established, and holds its fruit through much of the winter with little competition from wildlife.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 4–7
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Dry · Well-Drained · Moist · Wet
Vertical layer
Shrub- Soil pH
- 5–8
- Plant type
- Perennial
- Mature height
- 8–12 ft
- Mature spread
- 6–9 ft
- Plant spacing
- 3–6 ft
- Root type
- Rhizome
- Spread pattern
- Root
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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