Mahonia repens

Oregon Grape with berries

Oregon Grape (flowers)

There are several species of Oregon Grape. The most common in my area is Mahonia repens, which is a low, creeping species, usually found in our mountain forests, often under pine trees and on steep shady slopes, but also everywhere as a ground cover. Mahonia aquifolia is taller and more woody, and more commonly cultivated, and has volunteered in my yard. Mahonia fremontii is a species found in the desert, with even more prickly leaves. They are all used the same and taste similar.

It is recognized from the very tough, evergreen leaves, which have prickles along the edges. The flowers in the spring are yellow and the berries in the fall look blue, although they are actually purple with a light bloom on the surface. Many people mistake Oregon Grape for some kind of ivy or holly, because the leaves are tough and evergreen. Ivy does not have the prickles on the edges of the leaves, like Oregon Grape does. Holly has spiny leaf edges, but it has red berries instead of blue.

The berries are the edible portion of this plant. They are sour with unripe, but pleasantly tart with fully ripe. They can be enjoyed raw, although they have a few hard seeds which can either be spit out or swallowed. The best use for them is to make them into a jam or jelly. The added sugar offsets the tartness and results in a very good tasting jam. The taste is most similar to grape jelly, but with a unique flavor of its own. I use the normal recipe from a pectin package, following wthichever fruit variant uses the least sugar.

The roots are bright orangish-yellow on the inside, which you can see if you scrape off the outer root bark. This is the color of berberine, which is an antimicrobial alkaloid. Because of this, Oregon grape has many medicinal uses. The berberine is poorly absorbed in the body, so its main uses are a topical antimicrobial externally, and for gut infections internally.

On a taxonomic note, the genera Mahonia and Berberis used to be separated based on whether the leaves were compound or simple, but botanists have more recently decided that this distinction is unimportant because (among other things) hybridization occurs between the genera. The hand-wringing among the experts is ongoing, but the two genera should be considered synonyms, and all the species will probably end up being placed in the Berberis genus.