Chokecherry
Prunus virginiana
Also called Common chokecherry
We do not have a Blackfoot or Cree name for this one yet. Tell us the name and we will add it, with your word on where it comes from.
Dark cherries in hanging clusters, sharply astringent raw and good once cooked or dried. The other great pemmican berry. The stones and the leaves are genuinely poisonous, so read the cautions.
Speak with someone who knows this plant before you harvest it.
Take care
- The stones, leaves, bark and twigs contain compounds that release cyanide. Livestock die from eating wilted chokecherry leaves every year in this province.
- The flesh of the berry is fine. Do not chew or grind raw stones in quantity, and never make a tea from the leaves or twigs.
- Traditional preparation dried and processed the fruit thoroughly. If you are learning this one, learn it from someone who does it, not from a website.
What it is confused with
Harmful look-alikeRed-berried elder Sambucus racemosa
Elder has compound leaves divided into several leaflets and holds its berries in a domed cluster. Chokecherry has simple undivided leaves and a long narrow spike. Elder seeds and raw fruit will make you sick.
Easily confusedPin cherry Prunus pensylvanica
Pin cherry fruit sits in small flat-topped bunches on long stalks rather than in a long hanging spike, and is bright red.
How to know it
- Flowers
- A long bottlebrush spike of small white flowers, hanging or upright, in late spring.
- Berries
- Hanging clusters of dark red to black cherries, each with one hard stone.
- Leaves
- Oval, finely and sharply toothed all the way around, pointed at the tip, with two small bumps on the leaf stalk near the base of the leaf.
- Taste
- Puckeringly astringent when raw. That is what the name means.
The country it grows in
- Coulee slopes
- Riverbanks and willow flats
- Aspen parkland
Landscape types only. We do not publish where a patch is, and we are not going to.
When it is ready
- Berries August to SeptemberWhen fully dark and soft.
Right now it is July. Nothing on this plant is in season.
What it is used for
- Food and drink
Traditionally pounded whole, stones and all, then dried in cakes, which drives off the harmful compounds in the stones. Fresh raw stones are a different matter.
Cooked into syrup and jelly, and dried for winter.
How it is prepared
- Food
Cooked, or dried thoroughly. Heat and drying are what make this berry safe to keep and eat.
Do not crush and eat quantities of raw stones. See the cautions.
- Dried and stored
Dried in cakes or as whole fruit and stored for the winter.
Protocol
Ask the plant first, and offer something before you take anything. Tobacco is what is most often offered here. Say who you are, and say what the medicine is for.
Harvest the mature plants and leave the small ones to grow. Never take the first plant you find, and never take all of them.
Take only what you will actually use. Medicine picked and then left to rot in a bag was taken for nothing.
Leave the ground as you found it. Put back any dirt you dug up, and return any plant material you do not use to the earth.
Do not gather beside roads, highways or trails, where the plants take up whatever has been sprayed or spilled there.
If you are not certain what a plant is, do not pick it and do not put it in your mouth. Ask someone. Being wrong in the field is how people get hurt.