Foraging for Edible Wild Plants: A Field Guide to Wild Berries

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Location: Wild cherries grow rapidly from bird-dropped seeds, quickly colonizing clearings, and are common weed trees of "disturbed land" throughout the East and upper Midwest.

Season: Cherry blossoms bloom in spring; fruit grows in summer and often holds on the tree till fall.

Warnings: Wilted leaves and egg-shaped seeds of both red and black cherries contain poisonous hydrocyanic acid. Don't swallow the seeds! Only toxic look-alike is uncommon and inedibly bitter.

Similar Fruit: Highbush cranberry (not a cranberry at all), nannyberry, squawberry and other fruit of northern woods and marshes look like wild cherries (and sometimes are called so locally). Use a field guide to differentiate. Also taste test: If bitter, don't eat them.

Cranberries

Appearance: One of only three fruits native to North America (the blueberry and Concord grape being the other two), this round, red fruit with many small, soft seeds looks the same in the wild as in your grocery store. So prized was the cranberry by our forefathers that in 1677, the colonists sent ten barrels of the fruit to England to placate King Charles II, after they'd had the nerve to mint their own shillings. Tart, hard and virtually inedible until cooked, cranberries grow on low trailing shrubs or creepers.

Location: Acid soils and bogs of upper Northeast; mountain cranberry found in similar areas all across far North.

Season: Ripens in fall, often stays on plant over winter.

Warnings: None.

Serviceberries (Juneberries)

Appearance: The red or downy serviceberry of the East and the blue or Saskatoon serviceberry of the Northwest are both dark red to purple, three-tenths of-an-inch-sized fruits with small blossomed calyx lobes that look like oversized blueberries. Serviceberries have noticeable seeds and grow in clusters at ends of twigs. Some species are sweet and juicy; others taste better cooked. Native Americans dried them for pemmican.

Location: Serviceberries grow on small to 20-foot trees that like well-watered ground, often beside streams.

Season: Showy white to pink flowers appear in spring; fruit ripen mid-to late-summer.

Warnings: None.

Appearance: The wild strawberry is a tiny version of the domesticated varieties (it is of the same species, Fragraia), though it can be sweeter and more fragrant than garden varieties if sun and rain have been good. Leaves have three leaflets with serrated edges and are dull, not shiny like three-leaved poison ivy. The fruit is often raised up to the sun on longish stems.

Location: Fields and meadows everywhere that birds drop seed. Uncommon wood strawberry likes shade and is larger than common variety and not as tasty.

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