R

Mojmir Pavelka collected this extremely slow growing species from sunny stony slopes near Tortum, Turkey at 1,700m, after countless years, it can produce a 1.5m-gnarled spiny bush with short linear leaves and black fruits.

For some reason we always seem to forget to cut this, it’s rosaceous and native to China and Japan bearing 2” 4 petaled white flowers (unusual in the Rosacaea) followed by terminal clusters of 4 jet black shining fruits that persist until the following summer. Strangely ignored by plant breeders I know of no named cultivars.

Discovered in Ipswich England in 1837 it is apparently a chance hybrid between Ribes odoratum and Ribes sanguineum flowers reddish yellow in racemes followed by edible black fruit.

Hinkley calls it extremely hardy and rates it a zone 4 while Krussman considers it zone 7, and that is precisely why we dislike zone maps. A scandent species from the bamboo forests of Hueph Province; flowers are pink and berries are black and typical but other than that its very unrubus-like. Looking more like the bamboo it grows with (Lamarckian evolution? its more plausible than the creationists, but I’ll stick with Darwin).

Everyone needs a hermaphroditic Butchers broom, but cuttings don’t root and we feared we would never produce enough to list, hacking to pieces with a machete did the trick, and now you too can sample this perverse pleasure. Wicked evergreen spine tipped cladophyls (pseudo-leaves) clothe the naked photosynthetic stems rendering a semblance of normalcy, until the twisted hermaphroditic flowers burst forth from their cladophyll prison, pregnancy follows this depraved act and soon luscious round firm red fruits erupt obscenely from the center of each leaf. According to Dirr its shade tolerant, or perhaps such evil can’t stand the full light of day.