By Lee Gordon Native Garden Committee
This is part of a short series on some of our local native plants that are superb for our native gardens, but that are largely overlooked.
About a decade ago, my youngest daughter and I were exploring the chaparral on the hill above my house, and we came upon a small clearing. There stood two majestic fuchsia flowered gooseberries, in all their glory. These gooseberries made the clearing so beautiful, we have called it the secret garden ever since.
This fuchsia flowered gooseberry is as pretty today (mid-February 2022) as it was ten years ago when we discovered it in the secret garden.
Fuchsia flowered gooseberries are showoffs. Shiny green leaves appear in fall as a harbinger of the rainy season. The rains produce red fuchsia-like flowers, sometimes as early as December, but more typically in February, March, and into April. Plentiful bright red flowers contrast with the deep green leaves to produce a striking display, a show that lasts for months. The grand finale arrives as berries replace the flowers, and the leaves that were forest green turn scarlet red. The plant is still a showstopper! As the leaves start to fall, the berries ripen to a translucent red, and birds know it is time to eat.
The Ribes family (Grossulariaceae) includes both gooseberries and currants. The difference is that gooseberries are spiny while currents have no spines. Watch out for those spines! These are some of the sharpest and most painful spines of all our native plants. Place plants where you can see the show but keep them off the beaten path. You can handle them with leather gloves, but only gingerly. With moderate pressure, the sharp spines penetrate leather. When I prune mine, I move the cut branches to the barrel with the lopper, not my fingers!
In our gardens, gooseberries play the role of a medium-sized foundation shrub during the growing season. If you place them in front of taller evergreen plants, the gooseberry fades into the background when it goes deciduous in the dry season. Most of the plants I have seen in open spaces grow in full sun. They can tolerate some shade, but they bloom better in the sun.
I irrigate my plants once a month with 1” of water. The plants in the secret garden get no supplemental irrigation, and they are about as showy as the ones I water. They all go deciduous in the dry season whether irrigated or not, and they reliably return in the fall. Keep in mind that the secret garden faces north on the hill, which is the gooseberry’s favored habitat. In other exposures, irrigation may be necessary. However, if you water them too often, you could lose them.
Gooseberries can be grown from seed. Seeds stratified at 55oF germinate in a couple of weeks. You can simply sow seeds in the fall or keep them in pots outdoors starting around October. They volunteer on my hill and I weed them out. You can pull small seedlings with bare fingers before the spines harden. You can pull larger seedlings by grabbing them just at ground level, below where the spines start. You can also dig up seedlings a few inches tall, shake off the dirt, and transplant them into pots. Transplanted seedlings keep growing like nothing happened. You should be able to get plants at local nurseries, or from native plant nurseries.
When we discovered the gooseberries in the secret garden, my daughter was so enamored that she found a small park bench to put there. When the gooseberries are in bloom, hummingbirds are always there, too. I love to sit and watch them dance around as they feed on the flowers.
Leaves turn red at the end of the season as the berries ripen (below).
Seedlings like the one shown above pop up near my plants. At this size, they are easy to weed out. They also transplant readily to pots or to other locations in your garden.