Flowering Currant: A Showy Shower of Pink
Here’s this week’s wildflower tidbit. Keep following along and you’ll soon know local flora like a pro.
This week, Cheryl Lisin of the Lost Coast Interpretive Association (like the Facebook page here--you’ll be delighted by beautiful photos showing up in your status) describes the wild currant.
She writes,
One of the showiest of our native shrubs, flowering currant, or Ribes sanguineum, blooms in early spring. The pink flowers appear about the same time as the plant leafs out with bright, spring green leaves.
In summer, waxy purple berries form, which are edible. If growing in dry, sunny locations, flowering currant goes summer dormant in order to to survive the dry season.
Flowering currant is a beautiful plant for the garden, where it It thrives in partial shade with little summer water. It is native to many habitats in northern and central western California.
Currants and gooseberries, like the Sierra gooseberry, share the same genus, Ribes. The two can be distinguished by the berries, which are smooth and waxy in currants and spiny in gooseberries. Both are in the Gooseberry Family, Grossulariaceae.
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Love it. Any one seeing dogwood flowers. I will post some flowers I see today.
Okay, if there is any flower I like as much as wild currant it is dogwood. I haven’t seen any bloom yet, though.
I think it’s too early for dogwood, but bloom times for everything are all topsy- turvy now, so anything goes. I lived in Virginia for part of my childhood and the woods by my house were full of them. So lovely. It’s Virginia’s state flower, I think.
It does seem like bloom times are off.
Here is a currant from our yard
Native Fuscia B below
a
A trillium or wake – robin. Edible and medicinal. It was revered by Native American women and used for women’s health problems.
Thanks for that. Would they boil the tuber? Or what
b
The berries that form on these fuchsias (as well as on other varieties) make for some amazing jam….
They don’t taste that great picked from the tree.
Maybe like our huckle berries. Those maybe my favorite pie definitely if we are talking Native Plants. Got to say cherry pie for favorite fruit pie. Blackberry is pretty good as well. A fuchsia pie I will have to try.
Bleeding Heart
I dug up some of these by a small waterfall in the woods. They spread easily, but not invasively so. I love their name. Nice collection of photos. Thanks!
Thank you as well ,good info
Dragon’s Mouth Orchid Arethusa bulbosa.
Both of these are gorgeous!
White Fawn Lily – i think.
Some of these were just blooming on Showers Pass Road east of Kneeland. I agree with your ID.