The bright red berries of the highbush cranberry plant growing along the pondshore near my house seemed like an appropriately festive subject for a Christmas Eve blog post. With its coarsely-toothed leaves, which loosely resemble those of a red maple, long fallen to the ground, the bright red berries of the highbush cranberry are readily visible, and add a splash of color to the otherwise tan/gray landscape. But highbush cranberries, in the genus Viburnam, are not cranberries at all; true cranberries are in the Vaccinium genus. But the name stems from the resemblance of its fruit to that of a cranberry, as well as to the tartness of its fruit. And like true cranberries, the berries of the highbush cranberry are in fact edible. They ripen in late October, and can persist on the plants throughout the winter if the birds don’t get them. However, if you’re looking to harvest them for food, they’ll be sweeter if you pick them as soon as they’re ripe. The ones pictured here are a bit too far along for picking.

A note of caution on harvesting highbush cranberries for food: this plant taught me the difference between edible and palatable. My advice is to taste a berry before harvesting a substantial quantity of fruit from any individual plant. There is a native species of highbush cranberry (Viburnum trilobum), as well as an introduced species from Europe (Viburnum opulus). Although they look almost exactly the same, the native species has a (supposedly) tasty tart berry, while the introduced species has berries that taste like sweaty gym socks. Unfortunately, of the half a dozen plants I’ve found, they all turned out to be the latter. My hunt for the native highbush cranberry will continue next year.