Aronia: Why This Underrated Superfruit Deserves a Spot in Your Garden

Sara S.
2 days ago
3 min read

It's no secret chokeberry is a staff favorite here at Painters---each season we carry several different kinds! It's native, ornamental, edible, and birds and pollinators love it! It’s low-maintenance, adaptable to a variety of soil types, and offers beautiful multi-season interest. Plus edible varieties, like the 'Viking' chokeberry offer wide-ranging health benefits for humans.

Clusters of Aronia melanocarpa, Black Chokeberries, hang from green leaves in sunlight. Bright, healthy foliage and ripe berries create a vibrant, natural scene.

You’ll find Black Chokeberry, Red Chokeberry, and Purple Chokeberry (a cross of red and black) often here at Painters. We love to carry both straight species as well as some beautiful native cultivars.

Chokeberry is a great alternative to brilliantly colored but invasive plants such as nandina or burning bush--it offers similarly brilliant red or orange fall color, and you can find a range of size options amongst the nativars. Red chokeberry holds its rich red berries well into the winter, but the black and purple chokeberry also have lovely fruit. The berries are a nutritious food source for many bird species (including the gorgeous cedar waxwing), while the dense growth provides great nesting and shelter habitat. All three types of chokeberry have lovely spring blooms with pale pink to white flower clusters covering the plant and attracting and feeding butterflies and other pollinators. It's a perfect addition to pollinator gardens or bird-friendly habitats.

Chokeberry is truly a hands-off plant. It has evolved to tolerate a range of conditions - though it does prefer more moist sites and part shade, it can also grow in full sun and drier conditions. The red chokeberry tends to grow more like a small tree, with a more open habit and bare trunk, so it looks best in the back of gardens or with shorter plants layered in front of it. Black chokeberry is denser, and several nativars have been cultivated to be low-growing and work well as low hedges. Even though the shrub is deciduous, it can still be used as an effective privacy hedge due to the dense, suckering habit.

While the name doesn’t exactly encourage eating it, the fruit of the Black Chokeberry has been shown to have some pretty amazing benefits to human health. The deep purple fruit ripens in fall and is packed with nutrients and antioxidants. The fruit is definitely astringent and may make your mouth pucker when eaten fresh, but the flavor is really tasty when sweetened in a jam, wine, or simple syrup.

The 'Viking' nativar is an edible fruiting shrub that was specifically developed for the orchard. In the early 20th century, our native chokeberry was introduced to eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and Russia for berry production. Russia bred the 'Viking' variety by selecting for the largest berries on black chokeberry and that variety is still in cultivation there on thousands of acres for berry production. 'Viking' was re-introduced to the US a couple decades ago and has become a crop also grown on orchards seeking a harvest of Aronia berries.