They’re free*! They’re healthy**! They’re nourishing***! And best of all, they’re easily available on campus!

Have you ever been walking between classes and thought to yourself, “I’m hungry, but not enough for a full meal swipe, and besides, I don’t want to go out of my way for this snack; I want it to be available right here, right now, on this sidewalk”? If you have, then perhaps you’d like to try the berries of the Kousa Dogwood tree, which the university has helpfully planted on the west side of Uris for prospective snackers.

The berries resemble nothing so much as a spiky cherry, colored thinning reds, pinks, and oranges. The riper berries are a richer shade of red, but the recent storms knocked many of them from the branches to smash on the cement and reveal their pastel orange insides. While we here at Bwog don’t advise eating them straight from the ground (and we’re pretty confident that most doctors would agree with us), the adjacent trees still bear plenty of fruit for those who want it.

The skin is rough, with something like a sandy, gritty texture. It’s easy to bite through, but the texture is nothing great. Too soft to make any sort of satisfying crunch, but too hard, and too uneven to be easily bitten through like an apple peel.

Inside is a different story. All the online sites claim that kousa dogwoods should taste like a mix between mangoes and pumpkins, or even purely mango, with a hint of persimmon for the connoisseurs. (If you’re wondering why I looked through the farming websites, while Bwog appreciates on-the-ground field research, I’m naturally a bit suspicious of eating strange berries directly off an unknown tree.) However, these websites are all liars about the taste. The dogwood berries taste like a kind of sweet, flavorless pumpkin, a gourd with no distinguishing marks except its cloying sweetness. Watch out for the seeds as well—their hardness is often unpleasant to encounter in the otherwise soft berry.

It certainly has the color of a pumpkin inside, to give it its due:

Overall, these are not the berries anyone’s going to be using to bake into a pie, nor sold in small (& overpriced!) containers at Westside Market. But the life of an overworked college student isn’t always so easy. If you’re running past Uris for your sixth hour of class, then grabbing one, or a handful, might be exactly what you need.

Kousa Dogwood berries via Charlie Bonkowsky