yangmei / Chinese bayberry

Photo: Lucuscal — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Survives zone 7 through 9

Harvest calendar

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

Yangmei, or Chinese bayberry — a genuinely good fruit, sweet-tart and juicy, and a major commercial crop in Zhejiang. The catch is that it will not keep: the fruit bruises as it is picked and lasts only a few days, which is why it is almost never seen fresh outside China and is usually met dried, candied or steeped in liquor. Nitrogen-fixing, and needs an acid soil.

Hardiness

Zone 7–9

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Leaf, Fruit

Ripens

Summer

Mature size

Evergreen tree 10–20 m; often kept much smaller under orchard pruning

Light

Full sun to partial

Soil pH

4.5–6.0 (acid; nitrogen-fixing)

Environment

Subtropical

Native range

Eastern and southern China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines — subtropical hill forest. In Zhejiang and neighbouring provinces it is a major commercial fruit crop with a documented history of cultivation running to two thousand years.

Status

Cultivated

Years to fruit

4–5 yrs

Growth speed

Moderate

Spacing

500 cm (197 in) apart — about 25 m² (269 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Evergreen, alternate, leathery and glossy dark green, narrowly obovate 5–12 cm, entire or slightly toothed toward the tip, crowded toward the branch ends.

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

A round, knobbly, deep crimson to purple-red drupe 1.5–2.5 cm with a surface of tiny fleshy papillae, ripening in early summer around a single stone. Sweet-tart, juicy and genuinely good — the best of the family by a long way — but it bruises on picking and keeps only days, which is why it is so rarely seen fresh outside China.

Propagation

Grafting onto seedling rootstock is standard, since the tree is dioecious and slow from seed — grafting also lets you be certain of getting a female. Seed needs cleaning and stratification and gives variable results.

Pollination

DIOECIOUS — needs male and female plants

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.