By Sara Wright
During the early autumn I search for the first native wild winterberry’s bittersweet orange to scarlet fruits. Winterberry, a member of the holly family, loves to have wet feet and grows the best along the shorelines around the ponds and other lowlands. If it’s a good year for fruiting, after the shrub’s oval leaves yellow and drop, I will gather a bouquet to keep on the porch to brighten the darkest days of November. By the first of December most of my berries will end up between the boughs of the cedar tree that lights up the night just outside my door. A green cedar (leaves will turn dull brown in deep cold) peppered with crimson berries provides this naturalist with a dramatic winter contrast until the partridge and turkeys devour the fruits, usually not until January. I like closing the circle of giving and receiving for all.
I am acutely aware that this native bush that grows so happily along sunny streambeds, marshes, lakes, and fens feeds the wildlife around me. I am careful not to take more sprigs than I need because winterberry provides winter forage for about 50 bird species beginning with songbirds. Thrushes, robins, and cedar waxwings are among the early foragers that end with grouse and turkeys who leave these berries until last (it takes a while for the berries to soften up). Rabbits, hares, deer and moose also browse the twigs and berries.
Ilex verticillata can grow from 5 – 15 feet high, depending upon location. I love the shape of the bushes that get enough sun because they are shaped like a vase that opens to dense crowns of astonishing vermillion berries. The bushes I have here no longer get enough light, so even on a good year they are spindly and not dripping with ripe berries.
With smooth gray bark these branching zig zagged shrubs blend in so well with other wetland bushes that it’s easy to miss them the rest of the year. In the spring around here small greenish yellow flowers bloom in the beginning of May. The flowers are cross-pollinated by bees (and possibly by some fly species).
Winterberry is dioecious, meaning that both male and female plants are needed to produce fruit. Equally important, both plants must be in bloom at the same time to produce the berries on the female shrubs. Each fruit contains a few seeds. Winterberry is unique because its fruits do not drop to the ground after ripening. Instead, they cling to their stems where they can last for months. Even during freeze thaw cycles, they persist.
Winterberry grows throughout eastern North America and southeast Canada, ranging from Newfoundland to Ontario and Minnesota, and south to Florida. Fortunately, there are many cultivars that apparently grow in average soil that needs less moisture, so anyone who values the importance of birds and other wildlife can grow this plant.
One caveat. Although extremely beneficial to wildlife the berries are toxic to humans. Isn’t this one of the primary reasons that we still have these bushes in abundance?
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