In the Garden with Pat Rubin

Bee garden writer Pat Rubin writes about everything that grows, from flowers and trees to vegetables and lawns. Pat volunteered for several years as a Placer County Master Gardener and has written about gardening for many national and regional publications. In addition to gardening, she spends time raising and showing miniature horses and miniature donkeys.

In the Garden will include news, events, advice and other gardening tidbits. Pat will also answer reader questions.

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November 5, 2007

Winter berries

November, December and January are prime months for autumn and winter berries. The show starts when the liquidambars are burning red, orange and yellow, when the persimmons and cherries turn brilliant yellow and blue asters carpet the ground. It doesn't end until after the wind and rain have stripped trees of their leaves, and the frost has blackened the remains of herbaceous perennials.

So this week I'll feature a different berry-producing plant guaranteed to turn your garden into a fall knock-out.

One of the first berries on the scene is called beautyberry (Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii Profusion, pictured). It makes golf-ball-size clusters of incandescent shiny purple berries that surround bare stems. Truly, Mother Nature knows how to dress up the gray days in the garden.

Beauty berry is a deciduous shrub - it loses its leaves just in time to show off those ripening berries - that grows in an open, somewhat sprawling manner. It slowly reaches 6 to 8 feet tall. Clusters of lilac-colored flowers open in spring about the same time the shrub's yellow-green toothed leaves begin to appear. For the remainder of the summer, beauty berry is simply another green shrub tucked into the border.

Its cousins are the American beauty berry, C. americana and the Japanese beauty berry, C. japonica. Horticulturist and plant hunter Dan Hinkley calls "Profusion" the best of all beauty berries.

In the garden or in a vase, the combinations of plants that complement its fall show are almost endless. Pick a branch and arrange it with sprays of autumn leaves or with the bare, red branches of red-twig dogwood. Or try beauty berry mixed with the soft gray-green of cypress or juniper.

Warren Roberts, superintendent of the Arboretum at the University of California, Davis, recommends planting beauty berry with forsythia. The berries last well into early spring, he says, and contrast sharply and stunningly with forsythia's bright yellow flowers. Take a sprig of beauty berry and try it in different places in the garden, or against different plants at the nursery.

Beauty berry is available at most local nurseries. Several species of beauty berry are available via mail order at Forestfarm Nursery in Oregon.

So go ahead - plant a beauty berry and add a touch of purple to your fall and winter landscape.

Photo by Owen Brewer, Sacramento Bee

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