Frangula rubra

Sierra coffee berry, Sierra Coffee Berry

Family: Rhamnaceae · Type: shrub · Native

Sierra coffee berry is a California native shrub found in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in montane habitats at elevations ranging from mid to high mountain zones. Flowering from spring to early summer, this plant produces small clustered flowers with delicate white to greenish petals in compact groups of 4 to 15 blossoms. Growing as a compact shrub less than 2 meters tall, it features distinctive red to bright gray bark and reddish to gray twigs with hairy terminal buds. Its leaves are scattered along the stem, narrow and elliptic to obovate, ranging 15 to 80 millimeters long with finely toothed margins and a thin green to grayish appearance. The fruit develops as a black, two-stoned berry approximately 12 millimeters in size.

California counties: Butte, El Dorado, Yuba, Shasta, Mariposa, Nevada, Sierra, Modoc, Amador, Tuolumne, Plumas, Tehama, Lassen, Glenn, Siskiyou, Fresno, Tulare, Mono, Placer, Alpine, Calaveras, Mendocino, Trinity, Del Norte, Madera

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.