Currants & Gooseberries

Currants and gooseberries both belong to the genus Ribes, with species native across North America, Europe, and Asia — American gooseberry (Ribes hirtellum) is native to the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, while European gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) and most cultivated currants originate from Europe and western Asia.

Currants and gooseberries have long been garden staples across Europe, but their history in America took a genuinely dramatic turn: in 1911 the US government imposed a nationwide federal ban on growing them, because Ribes plants serve as an alternate host for white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola), a fungal disease lethal to white pine trees, which were economically critical to the American timber industry. The fungus needs both a Ribes host and a white pine host to complete its life cycle, so eradicating Ribes plants was the primary control strategy. The federal ban was lifted in 1966, but individual states kept their own restrictions for decades afterward — New York's ban wasn't overturned until 2003, and North Carolina still prohibits growing currants and gooseberries as of recent state pest alerts.

Pixwell was selected in Brigham City, Utah in 1890, from a cross of Houghton and Downing — both American gooseberries bred specifically for real, practical resistance to white pine blister rust and powdery mildew, traits that mattered enormously given the crop's legal history.

Invicta, bred at England's East Malling Research Station and released in 1967, won the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit and remains one of the most widely planted gooseberries in Britain.

Ben Sarek was bred by the Scottish Crop Research Institute and released in 1983 under US Plant Patent #9,889, notable for an unusually compact growth habit that made high-density planting practical for the first time.

Consort was bred in Canada specifically for resistance to white pine blister rust, directly helping restore currant growing in regions that had restricted or banned black currants — it's specifically named as an approved exception under at least one US state's currant regulations because of that documented resistance.

Crandall, sometimes sold alongside true currants, is actually a different species entirely (Ribes odoratum, the Buffalo Currant) — genuinely more closely related to gooseberries than to the European black and red currants that make up most cultivated currant varieties.