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| Kousa Dogwood (Cornus kousa) |
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| Himalayan Dogwood (Cornus capitata) |
The fun thing about urban foraging is
that you have a chance to find plants from all over the world. Recently when I
was walking through my neighborhood I spotted a dogwood with huge bright red
fruit that reminded me of a tree that I saw 9 years ago in the Himalayan
foothills of Central Nepal. I was just
starting a year of ethnobotanical work with Langtang National Park and went for a
hike on a trail that led out of the village and up into the mountains. I came
across two 10th grade boys walking down the trail carrying sacks of
wheat. We got to chatting and I followed them to the water powered stone mill
and watched them as they ground their wheat into flour. Afterwards we started talking
about plants—at least as much as my rudimentary understanding of Nepali would
allow—and I asked them about the large fruits that were scattered along the
trail. They said they were called gulna
(Cornus capitata) and that they could
be eaten fresh, but I shouldn’t eat the ones that had fallen on the ground,
which was too bad because there weren’t any left on the tree.
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| Heavy fruit production on this Kousa Dogwood |
Ever since then I have always wondered
what those Himalayan Dogwood fruits taste like. The fruits before me looked virtually
identical, but after some botanical sleuthing, I determined that they were Kousa
Dogwood (Cornus kousa), which are deciduous
whereas those on Himalayan Dogwood are evergreen. Kousa Dogwood is native to
China, Korea, and Japan. The fruit looks something like a strawberry, a pink soccer
ball on a stick, or a sea urchin skeleton. Kousa Dogwood fruit is made up of 20-40
pinkish-orangish red fleshy carpels that are all fused together in a spherical
arrangement atop a 3-4 inch long stem.
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| Nice ripe Kousa Dogwood fruit |
Throughout their native range, Kousa
Dogwood fruit are eaten fresh or fermented to make wine. The landowner allowed
me to sample a few and I found that they have a soft creamy texture and sweet
flavor similar to papaya. However, the skins are slightly coarse and mildly
bitter, so I have learned to break them open and suck out the pulp.
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| A few minutes picking |
Yesterday, Katrina and I picked a couple
quarts of Kousa Dogwood to experiment more with and I learned that unripe fruit
tend to have more orange colored skin, have pulp that is white and firm instead
of orange and soft, and most notably, lack the sweet flavor of ripe fruit. A
few fruits had hard seeds that are about the size of a Chokecherry pit, but
contrary to my reading about this fruit, we did not find them to be particularly
seedy, having found only 3 seeds in the 2 quarts that we collected.
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| Fruit mill making nice Kousa pulp |
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| Spoon method |
We started processing our Kousa Dogwood fruit
by breaking them in half and scooping the sweet flesh out with a spoon, but
soon tired of this and turned to my Squeezo fruit mill for assistance. The raw fruit
went through the mill easily, but the few seeds that we came across were too
large to fit through the auger and required several hard cranks to break them
up and force them through.
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| The ground was covered with fruit |
Our Kousa Dogwood pulp is juicy and
sweet and a welcomed addition to the daily smoothie. Next time we pick Kousa Dogwood
we will lay a tarp under the tree and shake it so that we only collect ripe
fruit that are ready to fall off.
