Creeping barberry is a shrub with rods mostly up to 30 cm high. Leaves are 10 to 20 cm long. Single leaflets widely ovate to ovate, 3 to 6 cm long, above frosted green-grey and below greyish, margins echinate and serrate, semi-skinny. Flowers are deep yellow, in clusters 3 to 7 cm long. Creeping barberry blossoms from April to July. Fruits are black, frosted, egg-like drupes, about 6 mm long. Creeping barberry grows in open woodlands, shrubberies, and plains, from bottomland to mountains. It ranges in the Rocky Mountains and their foothills from British Columbia and Alberta to the Mexican border.
Formerly, Cheyennes called creeping barberry alikewestern poison ivy(Toxicodendron rydbergii) because these plants are similar on a superficial view. Barberry fruits were used in some remedies formerly. Two Northern Cheyenne women, Josephine Limpy in 1975 and Mary Fisher in 1976, said that Cheyenne people learnt to eat the fruits until recently. Cheyennes boil barberry roots and stems and the yellow decoction serves to dyeing porcupine quills, bird quills, corn husk, and other Cheyenne traditional decorative materials of natural origin (Hart 1981: 15; Tallbull 1993: 56).
