Ribes (from Arab. ribaz), a genus of shrubs belonging to the natural order Ribesiaceæ, familiar examples of which are the Gooseberry and the Currant of gardens. The species are chiefly natives of the temperate and colder regions of the northern hemisphere; some are found at high elevations in tropical America and on the Pacific coast, from California to Chili. They are found also on the mountains of Northern India, in the colder regions of Africa and Europe, but western America is the home of the largest number of the species. They are twiggy shrubs, often, as in the Gooseberry (R. grossularia and R. speciosum), armed with spines, clothed with deciduous alternate leaves, usually palmately lobed. The flowers are axillary in racemes, rarely solitary—small but often showy in the mass, as in R. speciosum and R. sanguineum, the former a native of California, often to be met with trained to walls in British gardens; the latter, enjoying a wide range in the northern United States, is also a very popular shrub in British gardens, well known under the name Scarlet or Flowering Currant. The calyx is the most conspicuous organ of the flower. It is persistent or adheres to the fruit after it is ripe, a feature very familiar in the gooseberry. The fruit is a berry, not in all species succulent, as in the gooseberry, currant, and others, but sometimes, as in R. sanguineum, almost entirely pulpless when ripe.
The most important product of the genus is the fruit, which consists of sweet mucilage mixed with malic and nitric acid along with an astringent substance. The gooseberry, the Red Currant (R. rubrum), and the Black Currant (R. nigrum) are natives of Britain—that is, they find a place in the British flora, though there are authorities who doubt whether they are truly indigenous, being rather disposed to think that where they are found wild they are merely escapes from cultivation. They have, however, been cultivated in British gardens for centuries, and the fact that they attain to higher perfection as fruits in Britain than in any other country in Europe—that in France, Italy, and Spain, although the plant is well known, the fruit is always inferior owing to the greater warmth of the climate—is strongly in favour of the presumption that the plants are indigenous to Britain (see CURRANT, GOOSEBERRY, GROSSULARIACEÆ). The fruit of R. oxyacanthoides, R. lacustre, and others, natives of North America, are pleasant to eat and have similar properties to those ascribed to the gooseberry and currants.