Prickly Gooseberry Care

Ribes cynosbati is a North American species of shrub in the family Grossulariaceae (gooseberries and currants). It is native to the eastern and central United States and Canada. It has several common names, including prickly gooseberry, eastern prickly gooseberry, dogberry, and dog bramble. It grows in rich forests, rocky slopes, and open heaths from New Brunswick south along the Appalachian Mountains to northern Alabama and west as far as Manitoba, the Dakotas and Oklahoma.

Especially characteristic of beech-maple forests and northern hardwoods (where other gooseberries are not expected), but also in swamps and thickets, and even occasionally in oak-hickory stands, tamarack and poison sumac or cedar swamps, or dry savannas on rock outcrops. Sometimes the internodes are densely prickly but usually at least the younger ones are smooth or nearly so and the only prickles are 1–3 at the nodes. Rarely even these are lacking, and on some plants the fruits are smooth (f. inerme Rehder). The ovary and fruit (even in natural habitats far from any source of cultivated stock) are rarely slightly to densely pubescent, ordinarily a character of the garden gooseberry. The berry is reddish when ripe, and edible, but the tough prickly skin is not appealing.