Missouri Food and Drinks, Outdoors

Missouri’s Native Fruits

August 7, 2024

Missouri’s native fruits are starting to ripen, which means now is the perfect time for foragers to start keeping an eye out for pawpaws, elderberries, wild grapes, wild plums, persimmons, hickory nuts, pecans, and walnuts.

Riverbank grapes are among the native fruits growing in Missouri.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Mary McDevitt knew her three-acre Chesterfield property well, observing its foliage throughout the years.

She spotted something new that piqued her curiosity about 10 years ago: plump oblong green fruits clustered in some of the trees.

“Looking up at those trees, I saw the fruit and thought, ‘What is that?’ ” Picking one of the fruits and cutting it open, she took a chance—and a bite. “I just tried it, and it was really delicious,” she says.

A quick internet search soon revealed that she’d tasted a pawpaw, a fruit that is sometimes called the Missouri or Ozark banana. Before long, Mary, a fourth-grade teacher at the New City School in St. Louis, was sharing scoops of the soft, avocado-like fruit with her students during civics lessons. Eventually, this led to them lobbying to make the pawpaw Missouri’s official state fruit.

Look For These Five Fruits

Now’s the time to keep your eyes peeled not only for pawpaws but also for at least four other native fruits ripening from July until late fall. If you know what to look for, you can forage for everything from elderberries, wild grapes, wild plums, to persimmons, not to mention nuts from hickory, pecan, and walnut trees.

With more Missourians showing an interest in homesteading and self-sufficiency, harvesting edibles in the wild has become more popular in recent years, according to Patrick Byers, field specialist in horticulture for the University of Missouri Extension in Webster County in Marshfield. Fortunately for fall foragers, wild fruits are bountiful here.

“Here in Missouri, we are really blessed with a diversity of native fruits and nuts,” Patrick says.

In the fall, persimmons can be found almost anywhere in the state. However, they aren’t as common in northern Missouri as they are farther south, according to Andrew Thomas, associate research professor at the Southwest Research Extension and Education Center in Mt. Vernon.

Patrick agrees, adding that wild fruits can be more difficult to find in the tamer landscapes of cities and areas with large farms.

“If you get farther north in the more cultivated areas of the state, they’ll be a little more difficult to locate, but still you’ll find all of these fruits across the entire state,” Patrick says.

Wild plums may ripen as early as July and can be found throughout the state, according to the

Missouri Department of Conservation, with elderberries starting to ripen shortly after that. Pawpaws, persimmons, and native wild grapes like the summer grape, winter grape, red grape, riverbank grape, sand grape, and frost grape come along in September and October.

Which native fruits taste best is a matter of personal preference, of course, as Mary and her students soon learned during another civics lesson. In 2018, when they visited the state capitol for the first time to lobby for the pawpaw, they presented to a committee considering the matter. A lone legislator on the committee voted against the pawpaw for the state fruit because he preferred the persimmon, she says.

Forage for Fruits and Nuts

Don’t be afraid to forage for native fruits, says Andrew.

“If you have a little bit of curiosity, you don’t have to be an expert,” he says. “The trees are all unique and distinct, as are the fruits.”

It’s also fairly easy to find resources to help identify native edibles. The Missouri Department of Conservation, for example, offers plenty of online information about fruits and nuts found throughout the state.

The bright orange berries set the persimmon tree apart from others, as does its bark, which the Missouri Department of Conservation, in its online article “Wild Edibles,” says is so rough that “the height of the bark’s ridges and the depth of the valleys appear as if they were formed over thousands of years of movement by a fast-flowing stream.”

Proper identification of some native fruits can mean the difference between a delectable hand picked treat and digestive distress, though.

For those reluctant to rely on words and pictures, foraging classes and tours can help too. Visit Eat the Planet to look for events.

Don’t confuse pokeweed berries (above) with elderberries (below), since the latter’s bitter fruit can be toxic to humans. Both plants bear purplish-black berries, but inedible poke berries are larger than elderberries and grow on a long spike instead of in a flattened cluster as elderberries do. The easiest way to distinguish them, though, is to know that poke plants are herbaceous perennials while the elderberry is a woody shrub.
Pokeweed photo courtesy of Bruce Ackley
Elderberry photo courtesy of John Cardina, Ohio State University

Feast on Native Fruit

Persimmons are Patrick’s favorite fall fruit for eating. “A good, ripe persimmon is one of the tastiest of our native fruits,” he says.

Andrew says ripe persimmons are “filling and delicious and sweet,” adding that his wife, Diann, makes a persimmon cake “which is really, really good.” Diann uses an “ancient family recipe” to make her persimmon cake, he says, but there’s no need for modern-day cooks to rummage for ancestral “receipts,” as old-timers once called them.

The natural bounty of Missouri includes persimmons.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

The Missouri Department of Conservation has several recipes for persimmons on its website. GrowNative!, another resource for learning about native edibles, has compiled recipes from several sources. You’ll even find recipes for using wild plums.

And while pawpaws can be pureed and mixed into custard, pudding, and ice cream, Andrew enjoys eating them fresh out of the patch he and Diann have on their farm near Monett.

“The best way to describe it is tropical tasting,” he says of the potato-shaped fruit.

Not all native fruits are best enjoyed off the vine, though. “Some of the native fruits are better used to make something, and others are better used just to pick off the plants and enjoy,” he adds.

Elderberries are “not all that great fresh,” Patrick says, “But boy, you can make fantastic products from elderberry juice.”

Patrick does more than cook with persimmon seeds though. He explains that Ozarkians once fore told the winter forecast with persimmon seeds, and so he likes to slice them open for fun to look at their “weather predictions.” Folklore has it that if you crack open the seeds of a ripe persimmon (Patrick uses a vice to do this) and see the shape of a spoon, there will be lots of wet snow to shovel, while the shape of a fork means snow will be light and powdery. As for seeing a knife, it points to a cold winter ahead with sharp winds, Patrick says.

However, in 10 years, he hasn’t seen much variation among the seed samples he collects. He explains that “this is tongue in cheek and not a very accurate predictor of the winter weather.”

As for Mary’s students, after they tasted the fruit from their teacher’s backyard, they wrote letter after letter to their state legislators, even sharing recipes with them on four different trips to Jefferson City.

Mary’s fourth-graders were in the sixth grade in 2019 when the pawpaw was finally named the official state fruit. It was a long process for her students, yet it taught them that “if you stick with something, change can come about,” Mary says. “So it was a huge lesson for the kiddos to have that experience.”

On your search for native fruits this fall, you might find the same spirit of discovery as Mary’s students did as they tasted their first pawpaw.

Public Lands Where You Can Pick

If you know where to look, these sweet rewards may be only steps off the beaten path.

Head to a river or stream to search for pawpaws. MU Extension’s Patrick Byers says he often sees them along the edges of streams.

“Typically, they’re going to be found in areas where they’re not going to be brush hogged or sprayed or that sort of thing,” he says.

The pawpaw has been called the Missouri or Ozark banana because it has a similar tropical taste.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

While teacher Mary McDevitt says she and her fourth-graders learned that the pawpaw is an understory tree, meaning it doesn’t mind the shade of other trees, other wild fruits are more likely to be found in sunny areas.

“When I’m out and about looking for native fruits, I oftentimes look at the edges of woods. I look at fence rows. I look at fields that are growing back up,” Patrick says.

You can forage for native fruits and nuts in National Forests, such as Mark Twain National Forest, along county or state highways, in state parks, and on property owned by the US Army Corps of Engineers, as long as you take only small amounts for personal use. In other words, don’t pick enough to fill your freezer.

Harvesting in areas designated as Missouri Natural Areas, as well as at many nature centers, is prohibited. Do not trespass on private land to forage. Always seek permission from property owners.

Getting permission wasn’t a concern for explorers like Lewis and Clark, who, Mary’s students learned, picked and ate pawpaws as “fast food” as they hurried home on the Missouri River.

Persimmon Cookie Recipe
Courtesy of Missouri Department of Conservation

Ingredients: