Bog myrtle

Photo: Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Survives zone 2 through 7

Harvest calendar

Ripens: Fruit in late summer

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

The sweet-resinous leaves and small waxy fruit are used as a flavoring, most historically in beer before hops largely took over that role, and the crushed foliage doubles as an insect repellent. Sources genuinely disagree on the cold-hardiness floor, from zone 2 to zone 5 depending on the source — a wide-ranging boreal wetland shrub, so this catalog takes the more generous end, but treat zone 2-3 survival as less certain than the fully-sourced zone 5-7 core of its range.

Hardiness

Zone 2–7

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Leaf, Fruit

Ripens

Fruit in late summer

Mature size

1–2 m tall by 1 m wide

Light

Full sun to part shade

Soil pH

4.0–6.0 (acidic), tolerates boggy, poorly drained ground

Environment

Boreal to cool temperate wetland

Native range

Wetlands, bogs, marshes and lake margins across North America, Europe and Asia, tolerant of brackish water at the upper edge of salt marshes.

Status

Wild

Years to fruit

3–4 yrs

Growth speed

Slow to moderate

Spacing

120 cm (47 in) apart — about 1.4 m² (16 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Narrow, grey-green, aromatic when crushed, dotted with resin glands

Root system

Shallow, spreading and fibrous, carrying nitrogen-fixing actinorhizal nodules formed with Frankia bacteria rather than the rhizobia of the pea family — which is how these shrubs live on raw sand and acid peat where little else will. Suckers freely from those roots.

Fruit description

Small, waxy, resin-dotted nutlets in dense clusters

Propagation

Softwood cuttings in early summer, half-ripe heel cuttings in July–August, hardwood cuttings in November–December, layering, division, or seed.

Pollination

Wind-pollinated, and usually dioecious — but this species is well known for switching sex between seasons, so a plant that was male one year may be female the next. In practice a group planting is the way to get fruit. The crop is the aromatic leaf in any case.

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.