Ribes

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  Ribes Aureum, Pursh
• WordNet 3.6
  • n Ribes a flowering shrub bearing currants or gooseberries; native to northern hemisphere
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Ribes Rubrum, L

• • n Ribes (Bot) A genus of shrubs including gooseberries and currants of many kinds.
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• • Ribes A currant; generally as plural, currants.
  • n Ribes A genus of polypetalous shrubs, constituting the tribe Ribesieæ in the order Saxifragaceæ, and producing small flowers with four or five scale-like petals, four or five stamens, two styles, and an ovoid calyx-tube united to the ovary, continued above into a tubular or bell-shaped four- or five-cleft limb, which is often colored. There are about 75 species, natives of temperate Europe, Asia, and America, and of the Andes. Several species extend northward in Alaska nearly or quite to the arctic circle. The plants of this genus are often covered with resinousglands, and the stems are sometimes sparingly armed with spines below the axils. They bear scattered and often clustered leaves, which are petioled and entire or crenately lobed or cut, plicate or convolute in the bud. The flowers are often unisexual by abortion, are white, yellow, red, or green, rarely purple, in color, and occur either singly or few together, or, in the currants, in racemes. The fruit is an oblong or spherical pulpy berry, containing one cell and few or many seeds, and crowned with the calyx-lobes. Several species, mostly with thorny and often also prickly stems, the flowers single or few together, the fruit often spiny, are known as gooseberries; other species, wholly unarmed, with racemed flowers and smooth fruit, are grouped as currants. R. Grossularia is the common garden or English gooseberry. (See gooseberry.) R. speciosum is the showy flowering gooseberry or fuchsia-flowered gooseberry of California, much prized in cultivation for its bright-red drooping flowers with far-exserted red stamens. R. gracile of the central United States, its fruit bearing long red spines, is called Missouri gooseberry. R. rubrum, the common red currant (see currant, 2), is native in Europe, Asia, and northern North America. R. nigrum is the garden black currant, a native of the northern Old World; R. floridum is the wild black currant of America. R. aureum, the golden, buffalo, or Missouri currant, wild in the western United States, is in common cultivation for its early bright-yellow spicy-scented flowers. R. sanguineum, the red-flowered currant of California and Oregon, is another well-known ornamental species. R. prostratum, the fetid currant of northern woods in America, emits a nauseous odor when bruised.
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• • n.sing., pl Ribes ribz a currant, currants
  • n.sing Ribes (rī′bēz) a genus of shrubs belonging to the natural order Ribesiaceæ, familiar examples of which are the garden Gooseberry and the Currant
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