Red-Flowering Currant

Long before it graced cottage gardens, red-flowering currant fed the people of the Pacific Northwest coast. Coast Salish and other Indigenous communities gathered the deep blue-black berries in late summer, eating them fresh off the branch or drying them into cakes to see families through winter, even though the berries were considered less sweet than those of other native currants. The shrub's earliest gift, though, was its timing: it flowers before almost anything else in the forest wakes up, offering the first real nectar of the year to hungry hummingbirds and native bees returning from migration or hibernation. Early settlers and gardeners took notice of that same generosity, and the plant soon found a second life as one of the most beloved ornamental natives of the region.