Autumn olives are an invasive fruit that is sustainable to forage

Invasive autumn olives have a long, rewarding season. Ripening from late summer through fall, their small red drupes are tart, sweet, gelatinously juicy, and tannic, like an unlikely meeting of red currants with tomato and persimmon. Foraging for the fruit can be grounding at a time when events make us feel like we’re trapped on a roller coaster that jumped the rails into the void. Collecting seasonal food (“…while we have seasons,” we ruminate, darkly) can be very therapeutic. So gather autumn olives while ye may—they are a delicious sustainable forage.

Photography by Marie Viljoen.

One of the best feral fruits to be found, autumn olives (also called Japanese silver berry) are also one of the least appreciated. Introduced to the United States from East Asia in the early 19th century, Elaeagnus umbellata received a boost when it was widely planted in the mid 20th century to rehabilitate strip mines and to contain erosion beside highways. Oops. Autumn olive now thrives in the eastern United States, into the Midwest, and south to Florida, forming nitrogen-fixing, allelopathic, habitat-disrupting thickets where it is happy.

That’s plenty of fruit for everybody, including fall’s migrating birds, who spread it as they travel.

Picking autumn olives does in fact help curb the small trees’ spread, although to be effective, you would have to be thorough. Autumn olive is considered a severe threat, in conservation terms, in several states. Better yet, collect, then cut down. And do not plant.

You might notice the trees in spring, when, for a few weeks, an invisible curtain of scent may stop you as you pass the unobtrusive trees. Concealed beneath the silver-green leaves are thousands of tiny, pale yellow tubular flowers in intensely scented clusters.

The easier time to recognize the tree is as late summer dips towards early fall, and the red currant–like fruits are beginning to ripen inside their silver filigreed skins.

Dated conventional thinking supposes that a plant in a cultivated setting is a plant safe from escape. How can an exotic ornamental in an urban park or a suburban garden possibly affect the woodland or meadows or shorelines miles away?  The answer is the thing with feathers. Locally, where I forage, New York City is on migration’s super-highway—the Atlantic Flyway. Stuffed full of autumn olives, birds pass the seeds as they travel.

Collecting the fruit is a tiny gesture towards halting the spread of a species whose chief antagonist to date has been Roundup. In the age of Monsanto and resistant superweeds, eating invasive plants has never seemed more virtuous.