Aronia melanocarpa Seeds | Black Chokeberry
LATIN NAME: Aronia melanocarpa
COMMON NAME: Black Chokeberry
Plant Profile
The colour sits in the skin and comes mainly from anthocyanins built on cyanidin, carried as glycosides with galactose, arabinose and glucose, which is the pattern typical of the tribe Maleae. It is one of the darkest fruit pigments known in a temperate crop, and the same pigment class gives the red and purple of apples, cherries and hawthorn, all close relatives in the same tribe.
The plant is a North American wetland shrub and it ended up as an orchard crop in Europe. In Poland, Serbia, Bulgaria and neighbouring countries it became a plantation subject, valued for a crop that ripens on a small bush and can be machine-harvested, and the acreage there grew far beyond anything found where the species is native. Named selections such as Viking and Nero are widely planted for fruit quality.
Whether the chokeberries form a genus of their own has been argued for a century. In a revision of the apple tribe published in 1991 the three species were moved into a broadly drawn Photinia, and black chokeberry became Photinia melanocarpa in that arrangement; later molecular work supported keeping Aronia separate, and the older name is the one now generally used.
Chokeberry will cross with mountain ash, and the resulting intergeneric hybrids, gathered under the name ×Sorbaronia, have been raised in both Europe and North America in the search for a hardier fruiting shrub. The cross matters because it shows how loose the breeding barriers are inside the apple tribe, and because seedlings of mixed parentage are the reason a garden chokeberry can look unlike its label.
Science & Biotechnology
Bite a fresh black chokeberry and the sensation arrives a moment after the taste: a roughening, drying, tightening feeling across the whole mouth. Astringency is not a flavour but a touch, caused by large phenolic molecules binding to the proteins in saliva and pulling them out of solution, so the mouth loses its lubricating film. Chokeberry is unusually rich in exactly those molecules.
Alongside the colour sits a heavy load of proanthocyanidins, the condensed tannins that are simply anthocyanin precursors joined into chains of two, three, four or more units. They are the astringent fraction, and they are also the reason the fruit is processed rather than eaten out of hand: heat, sugar and the blending of the juice with sweeter fruit all blunt the grip of the tannin.
Uses & Benefits
In the kitchen the fruit is used as juice, as a concentrate for blending with apple or blackcurrant, as a deep red jam, and as a natural colouring for other products. The dried skin and pomace are sold as a colour and polyphenol ingredient. In a domestic kitchen the practical route is to cook the fruit with sugar and a little cinnamon or lemon peel, then strain it.
Chokeberry earns its place as an ornamental for two seasons rather than one. The flat, white, five-petalled flower clusters open in late spring above glossy oval leaves with glandular teeth, and the leaves turn fire-red in autumn while the black fruit hangs on into winter, feeding birds after most other berries are gone. It takes wet ground that would drown a fruit tree.
Growing from Seed
Clean the seed from the pulp, then sow it into a moist mix of two parts peat or leaf mould and one part coarse sand, covering it lightly with no more than its own depth. Keep the pan damp and cold through winter and be patient with the sprouting, which is spread over a long period in this genus. Prick the seedlings out at the two or three true-leaf stage, and plant them out at about a metre apart.
A chokeberry thickens by sending up new stems from the base, and a mature bush becomes a tangle unless the oldest wood is taken out. Cut two or three of the oldest stems to the ground each winter once the plant is established, keep the soil mulched, and no feeding beyond a light dressing of compost will be needed. Suckers lifted with a little root make easy new plants.
Our Take
I grow chokeberry for the autumn colour first and the juice second, and I never bother to thin the fruit. If you want the other dark fruit of the same tribe, my article on highbush blueberry takes the acid-soil route, the hawthorn is the pome cousin for a hedging row, and sea buckthorn is the other sharp, seedy fruit worth pressing for juice.
Related Reading
Gardeners who grow Black Chokeberry often pair it with these related subjects: