Black Crowberry Empetrum nigrum
Black Crowberry is a perennial shrub native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. It grows to 1 ft and blooms Jul in part shade – shade, with black fruit.
More about this plant
Empetrum nigrum, the crowberry, black crowberry, mossberry, rockberry, or, in western Alaska, Labrador, etc., blackberry, is a flowering plant species in the heather family Ericaceae with a near circumboreal distribution in the Northern Hemisphere. The scientific name of the plant comes from the combination of the Greek for 'upon a rock' and the Latin for black. North American Indigenous names for this species include asiavik (Iñupiaq), dineechʼúh (Gwichʼin), paurngaq (Inuktut), xéelʼi (Tlingít), xa skáawaa (Haida), and ts'nełt'ida (Dena’ina). Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.3–7.8
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- Low
- Wet-soil tolerance
- High waterlogging
- Height
- 1 ft
- Spacing
- 5–8 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- Slow
- Growth rate
- Slow
- Growth form
- Stoloniferous
- Lifespan
- Perennial · moderate
- Foliage
- Evergreen needleleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Summer & autumn
- Fruit
- Black
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container, Sprigs
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts Documented caterpillar host
Recorded feeding on Empetrum in North America, including:
✦ Bees 3 bee visitors
3 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Black Crowberry :
Wildlife & visitors 11 birds
Open records of who else uses Black Crowberry — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 11 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
Across 100 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Black Crowberry, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Empetrum →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (37) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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