Chokeberry
Aronia melanocarpa
About as tough as fruiting shrubs get — takes wet ground or dry, and pays for it in berries that want cooking rather than eating.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- White
- Sunlight
- Full sun for the best fruit, though partial shade is tolerated.
- Watering
- Very tough once established, taking wet ground and dry alike.
- Feeding
- A light feed in spring with a compost mulch over it.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- May
- Pruning
- Cut out the oldest third of the stems each winter.
- Apr–May Bud Break
- May–Aug Flowering
- Aug–Aug Fruit Set
- Aug–Oct Harvest
- Oct–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Apr Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 4 ft 11 in
- In-row spacing
- 4 ft 11 in
- Between rows
- 10 ft 10 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody and fibrous
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 7.5–10 ft across, about 1.5–2× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 20 in of soil
A shallow woody framework with the fine feeding roots in the leaf litter above it. Those feeders are mostly under the outer half of the canopy rather than against the stem, which is where water and feed should go.
Suckers freely from the base into a colony, which is exactly what you want for a hedge or a wet corner and exactly what you do not want in a mixed border.
The habit is Chokeberry’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
Blueberries, Currants, Comfrey
Shrubs, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com