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

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Season: Small flowers with yellow centers and five white petals appear in early spring; fruit ripens from green to white to pink to red in June.

Warnings: None. Wild strawberries have no nasty look-alikes and are never toxic.

Low Berries Of the Northern Woodlands

Appearance: These red, blue, yellow or white, nutritious but mostly blah flavored berries grow low to the ground in the woods of the North country. Bunchberries are a red stone fruit, borne in a cluster atop a whorl of six leaves. Easy to pick, but hard to separate tasteless pulp from seed. Cloudberry, found from the Arctic to New England, grows much the same as red bunchberry but with yellow fruit. Wintergreen or checkerberry of eastern and midwestern north woods ripens in fall and improves with freezing. A relative, creeping snowberry, is white, oval and grows on stems covered with tiny evergreen leaves. Bearberries of the Rockies and North are red and mealy, with colorful leaves used as a ceremonial tobacco by Native Peoples.

Location: All across the U.S. Canadian border, throughout inland Maine and north.

Season: Most ripen in fall; many persist into winter.

Warnings: Many species; a field guide is essential to identify absolutely. But no toxic look-alikes.

Evergreens, Junipers and Yew

Appearance: Red or blue berries growing along branches of evergreen (needled) trees or shrubs. American yew produces attractive, three-eighths-inch, urn-shaped red fruit with a sweet pulp and poison seeds. Western junipers produce dusty blue fruit that look like blueberries.

Location: Yew is a common foundation plant that can be spread anywhere. Junipers grow in California and in portions of the mountain West.

Season: Summer to early winter.

Warnings: Though the fruit looks tempting, yew is best avoided except as an emergency food. Never swallow a seed. Juniper berries are never toxic, but some species contain so much resin they are unpalatable. Utah, California and Rocky Mountain junipers are the good ones. A regional field guide will confirm edibility.

Other Wild Berries

Barberry, the common foundation plant is spread by birds and grows wild in many places. Its familiar, downdrooping, hard red fruit is sour but edible when cooked with sugar. Hawthorn trees produce a mini-apple that is sweetened by frost. Wild (seedling) apples escaped from orchards and wild native plums grow everywhere in the woods. On ocean dunes you'll find sea plums, sea grapes, rose hips and other edible berries. Take a field guide wherever you go. And in areas of unusual plant life—deserts, mountains, ocean rims—pick up a local guide so you can feast safely on nature's bounty of berries. They're free for the picking practically anywhere you wander.

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