Northern bayberry

Photo: Forest & Kim Starr — CC BY 3.0 · source

Survives zone 3 through 7

Harvest calendar

Ripens: Fruit from late summer, persisting on the plant into April

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

The leaves are the crop here, not the berries: dried, they are a documented bay-leaf substitute, used the same way and removed before serving. The fruit is edible but there is very little flesh on it and that flesh is poor, so it is used to flavour soups rather than eaten — the grey wax coating it is what the plant has always really been grown for, boiled off to make bayberry candles. Note that constituents of that wax have been reported as possibly carcinogenic, which is a further reason the berries belong in the pot as a seasoning to be strained out, not in a bowl. Much hardier than its southern relative wax myrtle (zone 3 against zone 7), and the two overlap on the mid-Atlantic coast.

Hardiness

Zone 3–7

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Leaf, Fruit

Ripens

Fruit from late summer, persisting on the plant into April

Mature size

1.8–2.4 m tall by 1.5–3 m wide, occasionally to 3 m

Light

Full sun to part shade

Soil pH

4.5–8.0; prefers moist, sandy or peaty acid ground but tolerates alkaline soil and clay

Environment

Cool temperate; coastal dunes and salt-spray zones, bogs, pine barrens and old fields

Native range

Eastern North America — Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Québec and Ontario south through New England and the mid-Atlantic to North Carolina, inland as far as Ohio, plus St. Pierre and Miquelon. Naturalised in the Netherlands and Germany.

Status

Both wild and cultivated

Years to fruit

3–5 yrs

Growth speed

Moderate

Spacing

200 cm (79 in) apart — about 4 m² (43 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Obovate to oblong, 4–10 cm, leathery and glossy, grey-green to dark green, strongly aromatic when crushed; deciduous to semi-evergreen depending on winter

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 grey-white, waxy-coated drupes under 1 cm, packed tight against the stem and held through winter

Propagation

Seed sown fresh in autumn, or after about three months of cold stratification; half-ripe or mature wood cuttings; layering; or lifting the suckers.

Pollination

Wind-pollinated and normally dioecious, so a female plant needs a male nearby to fruit — though occasional monoecious individuals are recorded, which is why sources disagree on this. Plant both sexes rather than counting on the exception.

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.