Ontario Plants
Foraging Gardens and Northlands
These plants are listed elsewhere, but they have been put here together to gather all of the native and cold-tolerant plants in one have their back yard produce wondrous bounty, who would like to fill out a food independence plan, these plants are useful. And for anyone with a home up north, or in cottage country, or who just likes the idea of being able to sample Ontario’s native food bounty, these are also great ideas.
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Where cultivated fruit trees, like plums and peaches, won’t grow, there are still trees and shrubs and more that will produce food.
Rugosa Rose – Rosa Rugosa
These plants come from Korea, and are native to the rest of Northeast Asia. The wild rose is, in fact, a form of food. The rosehips – the fruit that comes after the roses – are used to make jams, to flavour drinks and soups, and to generally use as culinary ingredients. They impart the flavour of rose to whatever they’re cooked into. They can even be used to make delicious teas. Roses, raised as a flavourful alternative food source, were once a staple of Victorian gardens.
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The plants are big and bushy. They produce huge numbers of flowers at the beginning of the year, and keep producing them until the fall. They take an incredible amount of punishment, too – dry and wet, sandy or hard soil, bright sun or cloud. They sucker and spread easily, so they make gorgeous fence and barrier cover, but they can also go wild. They get about 6 feet tall, with thick canes (with thorns).
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They love sunlight, and ideally should be in full sun. Don’t prune them aggressively, but after they flower, they can be encouraged to flower again by pruning back the dead flowers – “rejuvenating” the plant and getting it to produce more flowers. Always remember that if you prune the dead flowers, you won’t get the rosehips from it, though.
Sunroot – Helianthus tuberosus
The roots of this plant are something like a potato, but more delicious – you can eat them raw. Better, the roots will stay fresh in the ground for years (the plant is growing, after all) and you can harvest them when you feel like it. You can eat it like potatoes, or eat it raw, or just admire them as the wonders they are. This plant is related to the sunflower. It grows easily, and takes little care, but it needs a lot of water – you can’t let it dry out. It wilts pretty fast without water.
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It spreads through suckering, and can be weed-like, but a plant that produces food and creates a lot of it is not usually a problem. Either put it in a planting area with barriers, or you can do the “corral and crop” strategy.
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This is the ideal tactic: leave a patch of it, and use that as a long-term larder. Don’t eat the roots in this patch unless necessary. As the plant spreads, as the plants that shoot up outside this reserve develop develop, dig these stray plants up and eat the roots. This way, the original patch continues to develop, and you get to eat the upstarts that try to escape. The beauty of this system is that the sunroot will just continue to generate food for you, year after year, without you needing to do anything.
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Despite its name, it has nothing to do with Jerusalem, and tastes nothing like artichoke. It’s native to North America, but fell out of growing practice after the colonial period, when potatoes arrived from South America. Europeans took to growing it, however, and some thought it tasted like artichoke (it doesn’t, really). It was re-introduced to North America about 20 years ago.
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It’s a great plant to have around, and it’s native to Ontario.
Strawberries
There are as many kinds of strawberries as there are seeds on the Earth, or something like that. We grow only a few varieties. We mostly try to grow only those that are “ever-bearing” – they bear fruit all season long. We also occasionally grow some rarer varieties, from places like Japan and Asia.
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Eversweet
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Kent
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Ozark Beauty
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“Woodland Strawberry” – Fragaria Vesca
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“Virginia Strawberry” – Fragaria Virginiana
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Found along the edges of forests, this strawberry produces small, super-sweet fruit, and it makes for fantastic ground cover. Its roots help anchor the soil on hillsides. The flowers come in mid-summer and the fruit come not long after that. This is one of the best native ground-cover plants to put in any landscape.
Black Raspberry – Rubus Occidentalis
This is Ontario’s own native raspberry. It grows incredibly fast, and has a unique quality: It’s absurdly tough and strong. It’s one of the very few plants that can actually grow near Walnut trees. It loves the edges of forests, and even shady areas. The canes will grow, bend over, and then the tips that touch the ground will root again. This plant can form huge colonies that produce insane amounts of fruit, in the right season.
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If you want lots of berries, this is for you, but it’s so well-adapted to Ontario’s climate and soils, you’re going to need to control it. One way is to train it up fences, trellises, and use it as a divider in the garden. You need to cut the canes back after two years, anyway, because the canes stop producing fruit, so there’s no need to worry about it becoming permanent. But putting the rootball in an enclosed area is – ahem – an extremely good idea. They’re tough and can survive almost anything. And this means they easily colonize. The canes have thorns, so they’re good as barriers and along walls. Unlike raspberries, Ontario’s black raspberry can handle shade, too.
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​The reward for planting black raspberries is the fruit, which is super sweet, packed with juicy goodness. If you’re going to plant raspberries, we can’t recommend the black raspberry enough. It’s a little bit of work, but the reward is great.
Lowbush Blueberry
“Wild Blueberry”
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This is the native Canadian version of the blueberry. It doesn’t get very high, hence the name, but it spreads, and it produces a vast amount of fruit when it’s happy.
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The leaves turn purple at the end of summer, and the fruit is small, super sweet and dark blue.
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It’s also a tough species, and can take both long dry spells and heat. It comes back after forest fires, so it’s able to survive some pretty extreme conditions.
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Ripening: Late summer
Currants
Currants are food staples, or should be. The tart, sweet berries develop on long threads and hang down from the bush in mid to late summer like irridescent jewels. Currant jam and currant juice are staples of many childhoods, and the berries can be purchased in high-end grocery stores, in season. For a lot of money.
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This means, it’s much better for you to grow them on your own.
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Currant bushes are easier to control than many berry bushes, and can be mostly left alone to do their thing, but if you’re using them as barriers (as in a fence), it’s a good idea to keep them trimmed.
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The prices depend on the size of the bush.
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Golden Currant – Ribes Aureum
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Black Currants
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Red Currants
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White Pearl Currant
Silverberry
Native to the far north and the colder parts of the province, the Silverberry is one of the greatest secrets of Ontario’s native plants. Its flavour is truly unique. It has essential fatty acids, extremely uncommon in the world of fruits, especially berries, and it has a “mealy”, dry, even grainy texture. It’s sour until it’s ripe, when the flavour changes and it becomes sweet and sour. The plant produces unbelievable quantities of the berries, too, when it’s mature, which takes about 3 years. Native Canadians fried the fruit in moose fat, used them to make wine, to make soups, candies, and even soap. They’re good for making perfumes and oils, too.
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The berries make great – and truly unique – jam, both sweet and tart at the same time. They’re also good as juice, or fruit leather, to flavour yogurt or to eat dried. The seed is also edible, and has a fibre-like texture.
The plant’s bark itself can be used to make anything that needs tough fibres – blankets, ropes, fabrics, clothing – and this was one of its main purposes for native communities. You may not need silverberry bark blankets, but it’s neat to know you could make these if you needed to.
The bush grows in dry areas, on hills and in rocky areas, and it can deal with even the harshest weather. This is a super, duper, extra tough plant.
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The bush is a spectacular ornamental plant, because it has brilliant silver foliage and a showy, graceful appearance. The bush grows from about 1 to 4 m tall, and about the same around. The plant does one more remarkable thing: its roots can fix nitrogen, so it literally improves the soil as it grows.
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The Silverberry is related to the Russian Olive (Eleagna Angustifolia), which originally hails from eastern Europe and central Asia. It’s also related to the “Goumi Berry” , or”Cherry oleaster” (Eleagna Multiflora), which is found in North Asia, in China, Korea and Japan, and the Silverthorn berry (Eleagna Pungens), which is also from Asia.
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While these plants produce delicious edible fruit, and are interesting on their own accounts, the Russian Olive isn’t native to Canada and is considered extremely invasive in Ontario, and should never be planted, under any circumstances, while the Goumi Berry is also not native. The Silverthorn is considered extremely invasive and should be eradicated wherever it’s found anywhere in North America.
Sea Buckthorn
One of the strangest, most rarely eaten and weirdly delicious of fruits in Ontario comes from the Sea Buckthorn plant. It’s native to North Asia and Europe, and so is only found in Ontario where it’s been introduced, but it’s an amazing plant, nonetheless. A tough, cold and salt-water tolerant plant, it (now) occurs across much of Canada. In coastal areas, it has been somewhat naturalized.
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Long considered a serious health food, the flavour is something like a sour orange crossed with a mango. It’s unique, hard to describe, and wonderful. The juice naturally separates out into fats, a cream, and juice. These are used for different purposes, like baked good, cosmetics, jams, alcohol and juice. It has an almost endless list of important nutrients.
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The plant is male and female; you need a male cultivar to pollinate a female. The bush grows very fast, can get up to 10 m tall (!).
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Its root system is good at stopping erosion along slopes and near riverbanks.
Highbush Cranberry
This isn’t a true cranberry, but a Viburnum – a big, noble bush that provides big properties with excellent landscaping features. It’s a big bush, when fully mature – 3m tall by 3 m around. This is the classic Canadian berry. It tastes much like a cranberry, and it can be used in the same way. The bushes tend to be prolific with their berries, too. The bush grows very fast, if you give it full sun, but it can handle part shade.
Nannyberry
The Nannyberry bush is a huge, noble, gorgeous bush, perfect for landscaping. It sits upright, getting as high as 6 metres (if you let it), but with leaves all around.
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The berries are delicious, and taste like a spicy prune-banana – a prunanana, if you will, but with with a spicy zing. You’re supposed to eat it when it starts to dry out, and gets wrinkled. It’s one of the classic forager-fruits for Canadian wild living. City people rarely get to eat them, and they’re basically impossible to buy for any price. it’s best to just grow them yourself.
Northern Wild Raisin – Viburnum Nudum v Cassinoides
Related to the Highbush Cranberry, this bush was extensively used for medicinal herbal remedies and other purposes, but the berries are also edible. The taste is unique, with a small amount of flesh around a big seed. It’s often made into jams or other preserves. Crushing the berries to strain out the juice is what’s easiest.
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The berries provide a nice contrast with other kinds of berry – sweet, sour, tart, strong, a very unique flavour. They’re wild, as shown by the large seed and the small amount of berry flesh, but in exchange for this small amount of fruit on the berry, you get yumminess.
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It grows to about 3m tall, if allowed to, and can tolerate almost any conditions.
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The bush isn’t self-fertile, and needs another individual nearby to pollinate. As a forest shrub, it can grow in part shade and will tolerate a good range of conditions.
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Very rare, we have limited supplies of these shrubs each year.
Arrow Wood Berry – Viburnum Dentatum
A viburnum like the Highbush Cranberry, this bush grows to about 3m tall, if allowed to, and can tolerate almost any conditions. The berries are edible, and provide a nice contrast with other kinds of berry – sweet, sour, tart, strong, unlike the other berries in this group of species and with its own vital and unique flavour. It’s hard to describe. They’re wild, as shown by the large seed. It also means that they have to be pruned, or they get big – really big. It’s rare berry-bearing bushes like these that round out and complete an edibles garden.
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The bush isn’t self-fertile, and needs another individual nearby to pollinate. It’s an attractive garden feature, and great for landscaping, too. As a forest shrub, it can grow in part shade and will tolerate a good range of conditions.
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Very rare, we have limited supplies of these shrubs each year.
Red Chokeberry – Aronia arbutifolia
Reaching two meters tall, this bush has leaves that turn bright red in the fall. Its berries stay on the bush into winter. They’re edible, if very sour and astringent when eaten raw, but they make truly spectacular jams and jellies, and you can make juice of out them. As a landscape plant, they’re beautiful.
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Underappreciated and rare to find in a good foraging garden, these are good bushes to plant for something unusual.
Spicebush – Lindera Benzoin
This bush is used by clever gardeners for really impressive spot-impressions, because it has pretty flowers in the spring and yellow foliage in the fall. But it’s not just a pretty plant. it also produces delicious, edible berries that can be used in all forms of cooking. The leaves and twigs can be boiled to make a delicious tea; but the real stunner is a;ways the berries. Nothing tastes like these berries. A cross between allspice and pepper, with heat, flowery goodness and spicy sharpness, the berries are great to dry and use in baking, in jams, in cooking, with meat or for any purpose, or to just eat fresh. They don’t keep well, so usually they’re dried, but they can also be frozen.
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The taste is hard to describe, but once you use it, you’ll likely abandon many of the other spices you use.
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It’s an understory plant, so it tolerates a lot of shade, and it’s male and female. You should get a few of them if you want to get berries.
Black Chokeberry – Aronia melanocarpa
A gorgeous landscape plant, great for barriers or in gardens, this native berry bush gets about hafl the height of a full-grown person, or maybe a bit more.
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The fruit is too sharp to eat raw, but it’s known as a super-anti-oxidant for the health conscious, and it can be used in jams, recipes and in juices.
Canadian Serviceberry – Amelanchier Canadensis
The Serviceberry is one of the most storied fruits Canada offers. Used for thousands of years by native peoples, and adopted by Europeans in the early days of colonization, nothing speaks of fruit heritage like the Serviceberry. Closely related to the Saskatoonberry, its berries are the spectacular ingredient in classic jams, but are also fantastic when eaten raw.
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This little guy can get over 10 metres tall and 8 metres wide, if you let it. It doesn’t get very thick trunks, but it can be very impressive, with lots of trunk-like branches. It’s basically a treeform shrub, or a shrubby tree. It’s one of the hardest, absolutely most difficult-to-kill Amelanchiers, and it will grow well if given light, water and basically decent growing conditions.
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They make fantastic barriers ans landscape features, and have a beautiful mature form. You can even bonsai the bush, but this takes some dedication.
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Eat the berries fresh, and use them to make a wonderful jam. Combining them with crabapples is a good way to enhance both.
Saskatoon Berry – Amelanchier Alnifolia
Named after the place, it’s actually native to most of Eastern and Central Canada. It produces copious amounts of its namesake fruit, and they’re eaten raw or made into jams and jellies and everything else you can do with delicious berries. Everyone who has a bush knows how delicious the berries are.
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Like the Serviceberry (it’s related), a Saskatoonberry bush can get over 10 metres tall and 8 metres wide. It’s basically a shrub-like tree, though it takes some time to mature.
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The berries are good to eat fresh, and make a wonderful jam. They’re a must-have for anyone with a yard and kids who get to tell their friends they have a Saskatoonberry bush.
Allegheny (Service) Berry – Amelanchier Laevis
Related to the Service and Saskatoonberry, the Allegheny is a similar bush, but the fruit tastes very slightly different. It rounds out a good collection of native berries. The fruit is red to dark purple, with an apple or pear texture (relatives), mixed with blackberry or blueberry. Very sweet, some people say they taste like blackberries or black currants. They’re very sweet, and a bit crisp (not watery). tart, with a strong flavour, and the berries can be quite sweet.
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The bushes / trees can get over 12 metres tall and 10metres wide, one of the biggest Amelanchiers. It’s basically a shrub-like tree, though it takes some time to mature.
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The berries are good to eat fresh, and make a wonderful jam.
Roundleaf Serviceberry – Amelanchier Sanguinea
Related to the other Amelanchiers, the Service, Saskatoonberry, and Allegheny, this bush has red twigs. It’s most similar to the Saskatoonberry, and the berries taste the same, but the differently-shaped leaves and the twig colour set it apart.
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It’s very cold-tolerant, and the bushes / trees can get over 8 metres tall and 6 metres wide. With its red twigs, it looks wonderful even in winter.
Haskap – Lonicera Caerula
Haskap is a very strange, but wonderful, honeysuckle-like plant found around the north pole, including well into Ontario; Ontario is about as south in its circumpolar distribution as it reasonably gets. There are many varieties, or cultivars, but they’re all basically more or less the same. There are minor variations, but you need to more or less be a Haskap expert to tell. We grow a few, but they’re really very similar.
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This is a hardy plant. I cannot stress enough: Winter Cannot Kill This Thing. It laughs at winter. Whatever temperature you think you can handle, say you’re a winter sports fanatic, this can go way below that. It’s the sub-arctic survivalist berry of choice.
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The plant gets about 2m tall and is basically round, so about the same width.
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​Bad news: You need two of these, and not clones, because they need to cross-fertilize. Happily, we dislike cloning, and we like genetic diversity. We always have more than one kind on hand.
Oregon Grape – Mahonia Aquifolium / Repens
Native to Western Canada
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Not often found in Ontario, this Western Canadian plant does get around a bit, but in Ontario, it’s been localized recently. It’s a shrub that gets to about 1.5 m tall, at the most, and spreads slowly. What’s interesting about it is that it’s an evergreen plant – it keeps its leaves in the winter. It makes for a great hedge, especially as a barrier, because it has spiny leaves that deter animals (and people). Like other evergreens, it’s also a highly shade-tolerant plant, and it dislikes full sun. The leaves are also not edible by most species of pests, and deer won’t eat them.
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The plant creates pretty flowers, which look stunning alongside its deep green foliage, and the flowers linger for some time. Tough and slow-growing, this bush needs shade and to be protected from intense winds, but other than that, needs very little care. In a way, it’s much like a holly, in that it’s evergreen and hardy, but the difference is that it doesn’t have toxic berries like holly does.
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The pretty flowers go on to produce huge amounts of delicious blue berries. They’re useful for making jams or eating fresh (when they’re ripe). Found wild all over the pacific coast of North America, it makes for a lovely shade-garden plant that also produces food.
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There are many varieties, but we grow two: Mahonia Aquifolium, which is larger, and Mahonia Repens, or Creeping Oregon Grape, which moves along the ground and stays lower than the larger version.
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This plant is self-fertile, but having more than one plant means that there will be more berries on them all.
Riverbank Grape – Vitis Riparia
This plant saved European grapes. As they were dying out from disease, the European grapes were grafted onto the Riverbank Grape (among others) to save them from extinction.
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It’s clear why this was a good idea. Riverbank grape is a powerful grower – without other grapes grafted onto it, it climbs everything, even the tallest trees, wraps around everything, and it can take blisteringly cold temperatures that destroy most other plants like this. It grows everywhere in Southern Ontario. When the Norse arrived in North America, more than a thousand years ago, they called it Vinland – because these grapes grew everywhere.
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They grow very fast. You can get ridiculous growth out of them in even one year. They also love almost all conditions, even wet places other grapes won’t grow in.
The grapes are smaller, and have seeds, but they are intensely powerful in flavour, so much so that wineries won’t use them because the taste is so strong. They’re also both sweet and sour, at the same time. Some people think they’re the most delicious grapes to eat.
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​These are tough, delicious-fruiting and vigorous, fitting vines for Canada.
New Jersey Tea
This is a plant with some history. In the colonial period, native North Americans taught settlers how to use this plant, which was used to make tea and medical cures. When the leaves are steeped, like tea, it makes a nice, refreshing caffeine-free drink, but you can also use it to lower blood pressure. The roots are usable in medicines, and the wintergreen-scented leaves are an ingredient in many herbal remedies.
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There was a time when this was found in most Canadian and American gardens. It’s both beautiful and very useful.
Ground Cover Berries
These plants are also great ground cover plants, but they do produce berries.
BUNCHBERRY
Ontario Native Plant
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In a shady area, the bunchberry is the perfect ground cover plant. It gets about 15 cm tall, and eventually forms a wonderful wavy carpet. They’re fantastic in mass plantings.
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A shade-loving native plant, the bunchberry was a common plant in Ontario’s forests until they were all cut down. If it finds a spot it likes, the bunchberry will spread out and cover as much as possible. They spread by runners. They like shade, but can grow in sun if they’re very wet, but they dislike boggy land.
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The best thing is that they produce unique berries that make the most amazing jam. Their taste isn’t super special – not bad, not too intense – but they have incredible levels of natural pectin, so they can thicken things like jams and jellies and add substance to preserves. Since easier but less interesting fruit appeared from Europe, the Bunchberry has been almost forgotten, but this is a true natural gem in Ontario. No garden should be without bunchberries.
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For urban gardens, Bunchberries are exceptionally hard to find. We put a lot of effort into these guys. They also reward planters, because once they develop big carpets in shady areas, they require little to no maintenance. They just do their thing – look beautiful, and make delicious berries at the end of the summer.
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They need part shade to shade.
BEARBERRY
Ontario Native Plant
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A classic Canadian plant, the Bearberry gets its name honestly. Bears do, in fact, eat the berries. But it’s also beautiful, too – a wonderful evergreen ground cover plant. Even better, the berries are edible; too many can cause kidney failure in people with kidney problems, but the berry and leaves are used in herbal medicines.
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But the plant itself is also a bit of a marvel. They make great cover, and smell nice, and forest-y. They’re good for rock-gardens, too – like Thyme, they’ll crawl all over everything.
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Bearberries are super-tough. They can take full sun or partial shade, can take dry conditions, and are evergreen – green year-round. They do well on roadsides, beside driveways, along paths and in other places like this – and elsewhere where conditions are tough. They grow slowly, but surely. Best of all, they basically need you to do nothing but plant them and leave them alone.
TEABERRY
Ontario Native Plant
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IWith its evergreen leaves, this wonderful winter cover spreads under trees. Its berries and leaves are edible, and have been used for hundreds of years for medical purposes. The leaves can be used to make tea, and when they’re fermented for three days, the essential oils can be extracted.
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The leaves and little red berries have a strong mint or “spearmint” flavour, from the same spearmint chemical- methyl salicylate. The berries are actually dry capsules that last all winter, and they can be eaten (chewed) straight or used in cooking and tea. Traditional native societies used it for “headache, colds, stomachaches, increasing energy and breathing, and the oil was used topically for muscle aches, arthritis, and rheumatism.” Taken in large quantities, though, methyl salicylate is potentially toxic; it has to be a lot, but you can poison yourself. It’s not good for children or pregnant women.
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This wonderful ground plant only spreads about 10 cm a year, but it’s very tenacious. It does, however, need shade.
Ontario (Wild) Native Fruit Trees
These trees are as beautiful as they are useful. They’re the opposite of domesticated species, however – they’re wild, like Canada, and tend to grow fast, be extremely cold-hardy, tough, and hard to kill, and many of them are enormous as mature trees. Most of these are suitable for planting further north, or anywhere conditions are not optimal for delicate, easily injured fruit trees.
Eastern Redbud- Circus Canadensis
This tree grows to about 9 m tall by about 9 m in spread, and it has a shrubby look to it. They grow about half a metre a year, and the trunk can become twisted, like piece of living origami or a natural bonsai. But this delicate, origami-like appearance isn’t why people want to grow this tree.
The real reason is very different.
The Eastern redbud produces hundreds of brilliant, pink flowers, which linger on the tree for a very long time. For much of the spring, an Eastern Redbud looks like the plant world’s equivalent of a brilliant fireworks display. There’s almost nothing like it in North America – it’s almost shocking in its spectacular display.
This tree is, however, not just a pretty tree. The plant is also a source of food and a great addition to any natural kitchen.
The flower buds are actually edible, raw and cooked, and were a traditional food of native Canadians. They lend a salad a sour flavour, and are used as a condiment; the flowers can also be pickled. They have a high amount of vitamin C. The flavour they create is something like sour green beans. They can even be baked into bread, pies, or other items that need fruity flavours.
The leaves can be eaten when they’re young, too. The seed pods can be eaten, especially when fresh, like steamed beans, and the mature seeds can be roasted.
Native American Wild Plum – Prunus Americana
A beautiful landscape tree with spectacularly pretty flowers, the plum tree native to Ontario is the Great King of Pretty. It has almost as much visual appeal as a Japanese maple. It’s showy, and has cascades of flowers in the spring, along with a tall, upright straight spire. It can often be shaped into a column-like feature, but it has a very attractive canopy when it branches out, as well.
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The fruit is smaller than Eurasian plums, about 4-6 cm wide, but the fruit is both super sweet and still sour, so it’s delicious for eating and using in recipes. The plums don’t keep well, which is why wild plums aren’t commercially available, but commercial plums often lack the intensity of flavour of the wild ones. As a delicious native fruit tree, they’re well worth growing.
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Bigger individuals are dug out of the ground and replanted; this is expensive and complicated, but often worth it. We have very, very few of these.
Newport Cherry Plum
With dark purple plums, this grand tree is a beautiful stone fruit tree. It has a classic broad shape, with a tight central pillar. The tree is very cold-hardy, for a cherry-plum, and can grow well up to zone 4; they do well in Southern Ontario. Usually, they’re planted because they’re such a stunningly beautiful tree.
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The fruit is a good mix of sweet and sour, and is about 2.5 cm big. It’s very popular with animals, and with human animals, too. It makes good jam, as well as fresh eating.
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​Bigger individuals are dug out of the ground and replanted; this is expensive and complicated, but often worth it. We have very, very few of these.
Shagbark Hickory
Ontario Native Plant
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This was once an important nut tree for foraging, in a forest with lots of secret, edible food. But it’s not just a nut tree. The shagbark hickory is an attractive, legendary tree that once lurked in the deepest corners of the Eastern forests, a kind of spiritual or mythical being that worked its way into legends and literature.
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The wood is incredibly tough and dense, among the toughest and most commercially useful – hard, flexible, easy to polish, dense. It’s great for furniture and construction, which obviously isn’t so good for the tree, in an age of capitalist industry.
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Shagbark can handle a good range of growing conditions, but if it survives, it will eventually get huge – 30 m tall. They grow in most of Southern Ontario, and do especially well around the Great Lakes, like Lake Ontario.
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​The trees start producing nuts at about 10 years old. The nuts are highly edible, and delicious, so much so that some trees are farmed in orchards. Unfortunately, squirrels love the nuts, too, so people have to compete with nimble forest critters for the bounty. The nuts are a lot like pecans, and native Canadians, like the Iroquoian peoples, ground the nuts into a paste to make a kind of bread, a corn cake, and “hominy”. But the nuts aren’t the only source of food. The bark is also used to flavour syrups, much like making an alternative to maple syrup.
Hardy Pecan
North American Native Plant
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A huge tree when mature, almost 30 m tall, this tree grows all over central and eastern North America. It towers above many other trees, and spreads wide; its roots are known to go incredibly deep and far. It’s native to the central US, but was occasionally found as far north as Ontario. It’s extremely uncommon in the province. Ideally, it would be grown much more, and as a food tree, it’s incredibly useful, but it gets so big and it’s so impressive, and so rare, that it doesn’t often make it into a landscape planting plan. This is unfortunate, because it’s an incredible tree.
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For large properties with an exceptional landscape, nothing says “holy cow, that’s a serious tree, or should I say Tree”, like a pecan.
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They’re rare, and hard to find, but will grow well right into Zone 5.
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A mature tree will generate hundreds of kilos of delicious nuts, a famous and critical crop in North America. Used for millennia, the trees produce copious numbers of these nuts, which break out of paper-thin shells and then fall to the ground. They’re used for everything from baking (pecan pies) to roasting and eating raw. They store for long periodsm too. The nuts are eaten by animals, but they’re delicious and great fresh, for humans, too.
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It’s an enormous tree, so huge that it dwarfs many others. It’s important as a shade and ornamental tree, and its wood is spectacular for its grain and strength.
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Related to walnut and butternut trees, the pecan is similar – without the toxic juglone that makes walnut trees so dangerous to other plants.
Hazelnut
Ontario Native Plant
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The American Hazelnut gets about 1.5-2.5m tall, at most, under perfect conditions, but mostly it’s a shorter shrub. It’s beautiful and makes a wonderful centrepiece in a garden, or a barrier or for edging.
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The best thing about it is that it produces delicious nuts, traditionally eaten all over eastern North America. These bushes were common in colonial times, and they made a stately, noble statement in any formal garden. The nuts are eaten by animals, but they’re delicious and great fresh, for humans, too.
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As a bushy shrub, it has a special kind of grace. It produces male and female flowers, which look like jewelry.
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The bush can tolerate stress and conditions that would kill other plants – lack of water, too much or too little sun, pollution, pests.
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It’s useful, beautiful and tough, and makes food. Every house needs one.
Black Walnut
Ontario Native Plant
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The king of eastern North American forests, the gorgeous and noble Black Walnut has almost no company in its magnificent regal splendour. Historically known to dominate its forest canopies, it rises up out of the landscape like a towering symbol of the beauty of unleashed nature itself.
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The walnut tree is so gorgeous, it seems a shame to cut one down, but its wood is the classic lumber used for making the very finest of fine furniture. The grain is tight, the wood hard, the chocolate brown colour shining when polished. Black Walnut wood is among the most prized in the world, and for good reason. It outclasses European walnut so dramatically, and most other woods, that there’s little that can compare to it.
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Black Walnut is also an impressive food tree. Its edible nuts are usually considered more delicious than Persian or European walnuts, but they’re also harder to process, making them rarer, and difficult and more expensive to buy. The walnuts are rich in oils and fats, an extremely healthy food. The average mature walnut tree produces copious amounts of nuts, too, and over time, technologies have evolved to make efficient, time-tested ways to process the nuts to get at the inside. But there’s more: the sap can be tapped in winter, just like the sap of the sugar maple, to extract it and create walnut syrup. It’s sweet and delicious and carries the aromatic scent and flavour of walnut. Walnut syrup is one of the forest’s most luxurious products, if you can get it.
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The nuts also have a natural dye in them, which creates a deep brown colour. It was often used to dye hair, or as an ink or wood stain.
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As wonderful as this tree is, as noble and grand and stately, its time as king is a lonely one. The tree produces the chemical juglone in most of its tissues, which has the effect of killing other plants. Around the walnut tree, very little else grows. Even its own seedlings have trouble growing near an adult black walnut. Planting a walnut is a wonderful investment, but plant it away from trees or plants you don’t want to kill. If it weren’t for the chemical weapons the tree produces, it would almost be possible to imagine that other trees and plants retreat from the majesty and splendour of the regal Black Walnut.
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​Never plant a black walnut as a frivolous gesture. Plant it because you mean it, and know what a magnificent thing you’ve done once you do it.
Butternut
Ontario Native Plant
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Butternut is one of the trees many have forgotten because they were all cut down for furniture and flooring two generations ago. There was a time when butternut was cropped as if it were wheat, when trees that were 50 to 75 years old vanished so quickly, they disappeared from the landscape as if felled by a great mechanical axe all at once. The tragedy is that they were beautiful, and they produced immense amounts of fruit and nuts.
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The tree grows incredibly fast, but doesn’t live very long. A tree 75 years is a very old butternut tree. It can survive in the far north, right to Zone 2, but it produces nuts only up to Zone 3 – but what this means is that it can still live in the far north, and makes a great tree for cottage country and the city, too. In good, warm years, it will produce nuts even when it’s approaching the boreal forest. As a food foraging tree, they’re even better than walnut and other nuts, because of the sheer quantity of the nuts they produce.
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They need full sun to really do well.
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At one time, the butternut was a key foraging food in southern Ontario forests. The nut is oily and rich, a delicious fall treat. The nuts are 20% protein and rich in oils and fats, even more delicious than walnuts.
Sand Cherry
Ontario Native Plant
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Found all over Ontario, the sand cherry is common in, of course, sandy areas, especially on beaches around the Great Lakes. It’s a shrubby little thing, though it can grow to about 6 m tall under ideal circumstances. It spreads by suckers, underground, and can form densely packed colonies of plants. It’s a good shrub to plant in tough areas of a garden, or on hillsides, and if left alone, will slowly reach up into a big bushy colony. It’s very useful for difficult areas in landscaping, because it helps to stabilize soil, likes to live near shorelines, can tolerate dry, sandy conditions as well as richer soils, and will run off weeds from disturbed land by out-competing them.
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The good thing about the sandcherry is that it produces cherries – the largest of the North American native cherry plants, and they’re also the best tasting of the native cherries. It produces the in large quantities, too, usually in the early summer, which means that gardeners get an early crop. Because it’s so early, it makes a good addition to a foraging garden that has other, later fruits to pick. The cherries can be made into jams, jellies, used for juice or eaten raw, and they’re not as sour as actual sour cherries.
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If a sour cherry has to be grafted, usually it’s the sandcherry’s rootstock that’s used to form the base of a sour cherry tree, because it’s tough and resilient. Raising sandcherries from seed is a long and complex process – it can take a year and a half before any seedlings sprout, and the conditions required are extremely specific.
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One of the good things about the sandcherry is its resistance to diseases and pests. It’s also self-fertile, so it doesn’t need another pollinator.
Pin Cherry
Ontario Native Plant
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One of the fastest growing fruit trees anywhere, the Pin Cherry can grow to maturity in record time- counted in just a few years, not decades, like most other fruit trees. It also grows throughout Canada. It has a very short lifespan – about 40 years – but in that time, it produces unbelievable amounts of red fruit. All it needs is full sun, and to be left alone to do its thing.
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In the wild, the tree is abundant. Aside from scavenging its cherries, though, people sadly use this tree for almost nothing. The wood is too soft to be truly useful, and the tree grows too fast and gnarly for it to be structural. The cherries aren’t commercially useful, so big agribusiness ignores the tree. Basically, the tree doesn’t slot itself into any aspect of modern industrial capitalism.
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However, while it may not be economically pliable, it’s a wonderfully beautiful tree, in its own unique, wild, scraggly way – the kind of beauty you expect in an untamed beast that doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, gangly and energetic. When it flowers, thousands of blooms make the bare branches look as if they’re covered in gentle snow, and when its leaves burst out, it explodes into summer extravagance as if racing against the sun itself. It burns through the summer as if living a hundred lives in a few months.
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The pin cheery is perfect as a symbol for Canada’s glorious summers, and for the mythical summers at the cottage, wildly beautiful and beautifully wild.
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Pin cherries put up with anything winter can throw at it. It grows almost anywhere in Canada, right up to the treeline in some cases, from the east to the west and absolutely all the way up north that a tree can sprout. If you need a fast-growing fruit tree for the cottage by the lake, something that will produce huge amounts of great fruit in a short time, there’s no better tree than the pin cherry.
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The cherries are very sour, but this isn’t necessarily a drawback. The tree compensates for its lack of sugar by producing almost unbelievable amounts of fruit. And the fruit is, in fact, absolutely delicious, if you’re willing to do some work: pin cherry pie, and jam, and juice, are staples of millions of childhood dreams.
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Because the cherry flavour is so strong, making pin cherry juice and preserving it is a favourite activity for those who know what to do with it. You can later mix it with water or anything else to drink it, or even distill it down into syrup.
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Pin cherry is the northern fruit tree of choice for people who want the true taste of Canada.
Black Cherry
Ontario Native Plant
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The master of elegance, as a landscape tree, the North American Black Cherry is among the most attractive. Tough and resilient, it towers over other fruit trees and has a magnificent crown.
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The wood is considered some of the most valuable in the world, tight and hard and strong, perfect for cabinetry and fine furniture. Few woods are as luxurious as cherry, with its dark red tones and gentle patterns of waves and whorls. In furniture, the combination of black cherry and black walnut is like a congress of kings.
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The cherries this tree produces are dark purple, almost black, and rich in flavour, though not terribly sweet. They have a big seed, or pit, like most wild fruits, and though they’re not like sweet cherries from a domesticated tree, their sourness makes for perfect jams and jellies, as well as baked goods, because of the sheer intensity of the flavour. A mature tree can produce so much fruit, it can be overwhelming even for the most dedicated natural foods enthusiast. Collecting it all is a serious challenge. These are among the most intensely flavoured (if not very sweet) of the cherries produced by any cherry trees, and when they ripen, the animals appreciate them, too. The good thing is that there’s so much, there’s no risk of you running out. Every 4 years or so, a black cherry tree will produce record crops of cherries above the ridiculous amount it regularly produces, creating natural superabundance.
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Parts of the rest of the tree are useful, too. The bark was useful for cough medicines, and is still used for this purpose today.
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Black cherry trees need full sun, but aside from that they can tolerate a wide range of conditions, across many environments. Hardy to the very deepest depths of zone 3, they can take whatever North American winters can throw at them. For an abundant, continuous crop of super-delicious fruit, as well as a tree of staggering beauty and form, very little beats North America’s queen tree, so long as you’re willing to wait for it to mature.
Sugar Maple
Ontario Native Plant
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The Sugar Maple has to be the Canadianest of Canadian trees- the classic maple of song and story. Technically, it’s not a fruit tree – its seeds are inedible by people – but this lovely beast is definitely a useful food tree. This is the famous tree of winter glory, the producer of snowy gold, the source of food of the forest gods: the magic fountain of maple syrup.
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As an ornamental tree, the sugar maple deserves to be front and centre. The sugar maple is the great staple of northern forests, found from one side of the country to the other, the universal arbiter of forest green. Except, of course, when fall comes – that’s when the sugar maple’s leaves turn every colour of red to yellow to gold, and the changing of the seasons is marked by the maple as if the explosion of colour is fall’s last fireworks. Very, very few things in the Canadian forest landscape is as powerful as the riot of colour from the changing of the seasons, and the sugar maple is the crown jewel of fall in Canada.
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The tree itself is the tree most people associate with Canada. The Canadian flag was designed around its leaved with three points of three.
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For most people, the sugar maple is an ornamental tree, but for the very industrious, learning how to tap a sugar maple tree isn’t very hard. You need copious amounts of sap to make syrup, because when you boil it down, the ratio of volume for sap: syrup is about 40:1. But for the true food forager, a big back yard is not complete without a couple of sugar maple trees gracing the skyline.
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It’s big, it’s wild, it’s hard to control, and it’s got gold in its veins. Like maple syrup, the sugar maple tree is Canada distilled down to its essence.
Hackberry
Ontario Native Plant
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A long-forgotten but delicious fruit, the hackberry was once a staple of North American farmlands. It was widespread around Ontario, especially in the south, and once lent flavour to jams, jellies, pies and all kinds of preserves. Fresh, they taste like candies – really, they’re packed with sugar. They have more than just sugar – with protein and nutrients, they’re like an all-in-one trail mix. They have a slight peanut-like flavour, maybe like tea or dried dates. The berries can be pounded into a paste to be used with oatmeal for porridge or even for baking into bread. The berries don’t rot on the tree, so they last right into the winter, too.
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​Nobody grows this tree or this fruit commercially, unfortunately, even though this is one of the best lost fruits in North America.It’s a gorgeous tree, ultimately big and tall and proud, and its fruit is fantastic. Any foraging lifestyle needs to have hackberry on its menu.