Ribes rubrum group
Red currants are translucent, sharply acidic berries carried in dangling clusters. They belong to Ribes, the same genus as black currants and gooseberries.
Currants have an unusual legal and ecological history in Maine. Ribes plants are part of the life cycle of white pine blister rust, so planting and possession are restricted across many Maine counties and towns.1
The quarantine is not about the fruit itself. It exists because the rust alternates between Ribes and five-needle pines, including eastern white pine.1
Cultivated red currants are not a single untouched wild lineage: they developed from several closely related Ribes species, including R. sativum, R. petraeum, and later R. rubrum.2 The translucent skin encloses numerous seeds in juicy flesh, and the fruit’s sharpness reflects a citric-acid content reported around 2.5%.2 In New England, garden red currant is recorded as an introduced plant in every state, persisting around roadsides, hedgerows, riverbanks, forest fragments, and abandoned homesteads.3
Footnotes
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University of Maine Cooperative Extension, “Are Red Currant Plants Allowed in Maine?,” 2024. ↩ ↩2
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John Vaughan and Catherine Geissler, The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 90 (PDF p. 125). ↩ ↩2
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Arthur Haines, New England Wild Flower Society’s Flora Novae Angliae (Yale University Press, 2011), PDF p. 654. ↩