{"id":2926,"date":"2019-12-09T12:07:27","date_gmt":"2019-12-09T20:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=2926"},"modified":"2019-12-09T12:07:27","modified_gmt":"2019-12-09T20:07:27","slug":"forever-berries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/forever-berries\/","title":{"rendered":"Forever Berries"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Amethyst<\/a>
Amethyst berries light up the garden in early fall (By Photo by Laitche, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=44353508)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I am not a stamp collector and being a slave to the electronic communications that dominate all of our lives, I rarely send \u201csnail mail\u201d any more.\u00a0 When I do, I like to use stamps that make a statement, especially a botanical statement.\u00a0 This season I love the Winter Berries Forever stamps issued by the U.S. Postal service.<\/p>\n

The series of four stamps, created by botanical artist Steve Buchanan, depict four native species, winterberry or Ilex verticillata; juniper berry or Juniperus communis, American beautyberry, also known as Callicarpa americana; and soapberry know to its botanical friends as Sapindus saponaria.\u00a0 With berries in vibrant red, dark blue, eye-catching violet, and gold, the plants light up the landscape during the dark months and feed the birds, all at the same time.\u00a0 All have the best traits of native species: toughness, hardiness and the ability to get along with minimal human assistance.<\/p>\n

I covet winterberry holly, also sometimes known as black alder, coralberry and Michigan holly.\u00a0 Unlike the more common evergreen hollies that are ubiquitous during the winter holidays, winterberry loses its non-prickly leaves in the fall, the better to display its scarlet berries.\u00a0 Left to its own devices in its native eastern United States, winterberry holly will grow six to ten feet tall and wide.\u00a0 Cultivated varieties are generally smaller and can be pruned to keep them in proportion to their surroundings.\u00a0 I have seen winterberries massed in a nearby park, and they are dramatic, especially in December, when so many trees and shrubs are bare.\u00a0 Flower arrangers often use them in winter displays as well.<\/p>\n

Winterberry is not one of those species that is treasured by the horticultural cognoscenti and spurned by everyone else.\u00a0 Many varieties are available commercially.\u00a0 If you buy one, remember that you really need to buy two\u2014a male and a female\u2014to produce the lovely berries.\u00a0 Fortunately, plant tags and nursery personnel can usually provide this information.\u00a0 Sometimes the name helps.\u00a0 For instance, \u2018Southern Gentleman\u2019 is, as you might expect, a male holly.\u00a0 So is \u2018Rhett Butler\u2019.\u00a0 As in the movies, either variety can form a relationship with the lovely female \u2018Scarlett O\u2019Hara\u2019.<\/p>\n

Beautiful and adaptable, common juniper has virtues that belie the \u201ccommon\u201d references in its Latin and popular names.\u00a0 It is usually a branching shrub that can grow five to 10 feet tall, but has also been bred into lower, ground-covering forms.\u00a0 Its evergreen leaves are narrow and needle-like, and the bark is red-brown with an exfoliating nature.\u00a0 Juniper\u2019s secret is that its \u201cberries\u201d are not really berries at all, but unique rounded cones that grow one third to one half inch wide.\u00a0 They appear in tight clusters and are a poetic shade of blue with a glaucous or waxy \u201cbloom\u201d on them.\u00a0 As alcohol aficionados can attest, those juniper berries provide the distinctive flavoring for gin.\u00a0 Woody plant guru Dr. Michael Dirr also notes that they have been used as a diuretic.\u00a0 Gin drinkers may know this already.<\/p>\n

Someday I will buy an American beautyberry or callicarpa, another species that I have coveted for years.\u00a0 Native to the southeastern United States, the three to eight-foot shrubs have attractive green leaves that are three to six inches long and oval-shaped.\u00a0 The flowers are pinkish-purple and bloom in early to mid summer.\u00a0 Beautyberry is never really ugly, but it lives up to its name in the late summer and early fall when the stem nodes are encircled by fat clusters of eye-catching purple berries.\u00a0 Depending on the shrub\u2019s location, the weather, and the hunger of local birds, the berries may persist well into winter.\u00a0 The branches really spice up indoor arrangements, but given the general barrenness outside, it may be better to leave them on the bushes.<\/p>\n

Soapberry produces dramatic golden orange berries in October that persist through winter, like little points of light.\u00a0 The species depicted on the stamps is the wingleaf or winged soapberry, an evergreen tree that grows 20 to 40-feet tall and wide in its native range in the lower southern United States and tropical areas farther south.\u00a0 Needless to say, it is not winter hardy.\u00a0 However, gardeners in cooler areas, through USDA plant hardiness zone 6, can rejoice, because Sapindus drummondii or western soapberry will grow farther north.\u00a0 The berries are the same attractive golden color on trees that grow 25 to 30 feet tall and wide.\u00a0 Compound leaves are rich green in summer and turn golden in the fall, adding a season of interest.\u00a0 The Latin genus name means \u201csoapy\u201d and refers to the berries, which indigenous peoples mashed in water to produce a soapy cleaning liquid.\u00a0 While useful against dirt, the berries are also toxic to humans.<\/p>\n

As postage sales have declined, the U.S. Postal Service has made a great effort to create stamps that are more interesting and colorful.\u00a0 They certainly piqued my interest with the Winter Berries Forever series.\u00a0 I am rather glad that my infrequent mailing habit will make my book of twenty stamps persist through the winter, just like the berries on their faces.<\/p>\n

\"Winterberry<\/a>
Winterberry holly<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am not a stamp collector and being a slave to the electronic communications that dominate all of our lives, I rarely send \u201csnail mail\u201d any more.\u00a0 When I do, I like to use stamps that make a statement, especially a botanical statement.\u00a0 This season I love the Winter Berries Forever stamps issued by the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,5],"tags":[472,2220,2213,2212,2215,2214,2219,2216,2217,2218,1993],"class_list":["post-2926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-winter","tag-beautyberry","tag-botanical-stamps","tag-callicarpa-americana","tag-ilex-verticillata","tag-jumiperus-commutatus","tag-juniper-berry","tag-postage-stamps","tag-soapberry","tag-spindus-drummondii","tag-western-soapberry","tag-winterberry-holly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2926"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2927,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions\/2927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}