Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, in our back garden.

Those of us lucky enough to have gardens have been enjoying the recent spring sunshine, which is compensation for the current restrictions in our lives.

Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, is another of my favourite plants. My Dad grew it in our gardens in the West Midlands and North-east Scotland when I was a child, alongside Forsythia,  giving a beautiful spring splash of colour (the reddish pink of Flowering Currant contrasting with the bright yellow of Forsythia). Both plants were extremely popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but the became less fashionable, which is a shame. For me they give a blast of pure nostalgia.

The first Flowering Currant I grew was Ribes sanguineum King Edward VII’, planted when I was about ten years old, and I now grow Ribes sanguineum ‘Pulborough Scarlet’ in our back garden in Norwich. I have also encountered the plant many times on my travels, in gardens and in the countryside. The distribution map in the Online Atlas of the British and Irish Flora shows naturalised Ribes sanguineum growing widely across the British Isles. Habitats include woods, verges, hedges and waste ground. It grows beside the railway line from Norwich to Sheringham, by the edges of a cutting just south of Roughton Road station. (Sadly, I’ll miss it there this spring.)

Ribes sanguineum is a native of the western United States (California, Idaho, Oregon and Washington states) and Canada (British Columbia) [Note 1]. It is a member of family Grossulariaceae, the Currant family, which contains just one genus, Ribes, of which there are about 150 species, which grow in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. Flowering Currant, Ribes sanguineum, is a close relative of Blackcurrants (Ribes nigrum) and Redcurrants (Ribes rubrum) and Gooseberries (Rumex uva-crispa) [Note 2]. Ribes sanguineum has a delicious “curranty” smell, rather like Blackcurrant, when you touch its foliage or sometimes just in warm sunshine.

Other English names for Flowering Currant include Redflower Currant, Blood Currant, Pink-flowered Currant, Red Flowering Currant. “Blood Currant” is a translation from the scientific name: Ribes means “currant” and sanguineum means “bloody” (as in Bloody Crane’s-bill, Geranium sanguineum, which I wrote about in 2018).

Ribes sanguineum is an easy shrub to grow in a garden and will grow in full sun or partial shade. In our last garden I grew it up the north side of a fence, so the base was in dense shade, but the top of the plant reached up into the sunlight. In our present garden it grows in a border in sandy loam in a west-facing bed, where it has sun in the morning but is in shade by mid afternoon.

Flowering Currant takes the form of a deciduous shrub up to 2.5 metres (8 feet) tall. It can grow that wide too, but I have trained mine to grow as an upright column. It’s an easy shrub to prune and I have seen it grown as a hedge (‘Pulborough Scarlet’ is especially good for this). You can even train it up a wall or fence. If you need to trim it, do so just after flowering. It is hardy (to -15 or even -20 degrees Celsius) and flowers very reliably, from as early as March until mid April or, in colder areas, May.

The commonest garden cultivars are ‘Pulborough Scarlet’ (deep crimson flowers with white centres) and ‘King Edward VII’ (pendulous dark crimson flowers), both of which are very good. Other forms include ‘Red Bross’ (scarlet buds, opening to reddish-pink flowers), ‘Koja’ (pinky-red flowers) and ‘Porky’s Pink’ (described as having candyfloss-pink blooms). For something a bit different, there are white-flowered forms, such as ‘White Icicle‘ [Note 3]. Form ‘Brocklebankii’ has yellow-green foliage, if you like that sort of thing.

Other Ribes are worth growing, but are not commonly found in garden centres. They include Ribes laurifolium (evergreen, with greeny-white flowers in late winter), Ribes speciosum (dangling flowers almost like a Fuchsia) and Ribes odoratum (yellow, clove-scented flowers).

In my own experience, Flowering Currant doesn’t seem to be affected by pests, though the RHS list aphids, leaf spot, powdery mildews, honey fungus and coral spot as possible problems. (it is very susceptible to Honey fungus, apparently.) In the United States, species of Ribes can act as an alternatve host to White Pine Blister Rust, Cronartium ribicola, a fungus accidentally introduced from China in 1900 [Note 4].

Ribes sanguineum is good wildlife plant and provides a very important source of  nectar and pollen for newly-emerged queen bumblebees and also the Hairy-footed Flower Bee (Anthophora plumipes). This is another good reason to grow it in your garden.

Tree Bumblebee, Bombus hypnorum, queen on Flowering Currant

Male Hairy-footed Flower Bee, Anthophora plumipes

Female Anthophora plumipes 

Buff-tailed Bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, queen

Later in the year Flowering Currant has strings of berries, rather like its Redcurrant and Blackcurrant relatives. These are edible but not enjoyable. The Plants for a Future website damns them with faint praise: “not … a wonderful flavour, but … tolerable raw”. Apparently, they “can be harvested when still firm in August and when stored carefully will keep until November, by which time the flavour has improved slightly”.

I leave the berries on mine for the birds. Blackbirds’ appetite for the berries is probably one reason why the plant now occurs widely in the countryside.

Notes

Note 1 – In the wild, there are two distinct forms of Ribes sanguineum: var. sanguineum and var. glutinosum. The differences are listed on the Flora of North America website as:

• Racemes 5-15(-20)-flowered, erect to stiffly spreading or ascending; sepals red – var. sanguineum.
• Racemes 15-40-flowered, pendent; sepals pink to white – var. glutinosum.

The plant was first described by Archibald Menzies in 1793, and was introduced into Britain in the early 19th Century (1826, according to the Online Atlas, or 1817, according to Paghat). They were known from the wild by 1916.

Note 2 – Stace (New Flora of the British Isles, Fourth Edition, 2019) lists eight species of Ribes growing wild in the British Isles.

1. Ribes rubrum (Redcurrant) – probably native but also found as a garden escape.
2. Ribes spicatum (Downy Currant) – native and local in woods on limestone from Lancashire and Yorkshire north to Caithness.
3. Ribes nigrum (Blackcurrant) – Neophyte / naturalised.
4. Ribes sanguineum (Flowering Currant) – Neophyte / naturalised.
5. Ribes odoratum (Buffalo Currant) – Neophyte / naturalised survivor.
6. Ribes alpinum (Mountain Currant) – Native in limestone woods in Northern England; escape elsewhere
7. Ribes uva-crispa (Gooseberry) – Neophyte / naturalised.
8. Ribes divaricatum (Coast Gooseberry) – Neophyte / naturalised survivor.

I have seen 1, 3, 4 and 7 growing in the wild.

Note 3 – Much of my information on different Ribes cultivars and species in the garden comes from the article “Currant Affairs” by Louise Curley, in the March 2017 edition of “The English Garden“.

(I keep a stash of these magazines in the summerhouse at the bottom of our garden for browsing from time to time with a cup of tea. My wife Vanna refers to them as my “garden porn”.)

Note 4 – See the American Phytopathological Society website for more details.