Plant · P-466

Salmonberry

Rubus spectabilis

Salmonberry is a thicket-forming bramble of the Pacific coast, native from southern coastal Alaska through British Columbia to northwestern California, rarely straying east of the Cascades. Its yellow-to-salmon-red fruit is juicy and good flavored eaten raw, cooked or dried, and the young spring shoots can be peeled and eaten like asparagus. It is an important wildlife plant too - bears, deer, elk and small mammals all take the fruit and foliage, and the flowers feed bees and rufous hummingbirds. It spreads aggressively by rhizome into dense thickets, but only where the climate stays cool and humid and the ground stays consistently wet - it fruits poorly in cool summers and does not hold up through long hot ones at all.