By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on August 27, 2002
Operation NICE! (Natives Instead of the Common Exotics!) is recommending American beautyberry as plant of the month for September.
This is the leafy shrub which gets lots of attention in the fall when its arching branches become loaded with bright purple berries. This year, American beautyberry seems to be rushing the season. The berries already are turning purple in the Boerne area.
American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is an easy-to-grow shrub that does well in the shade of large trees. Commonly beautyberry reaches 4 to 6 feet high, or even higher, and spreads laterally for many feet. The one we planted in our backyard six or seven years ago is now 8 feet high and 10 feet wide.
These shrubs need room to spread. Jill Nokes recommends that American beautyberry “should be cut back by half its overall height each winter to encourage more compact growth, flowers, and fruit.”
Beautyberry can be a good screen shrub from spring to early winter. During the winter the multi-branching limbs are bare, but commonly the clusters of purple berries remain even after the leaves fall.
How long the berries stay depends on the birds in the vicinity. Our mockingbirds and cardinals find the berries irresistible.
I first took notice of American beautyberry when we moved to East Texas as newlyweds. My job took me into the Piney Woods, where I discovered a whole set of plants unknown to a boy from Central Texas.
In the eastern woods, American beautyberry grows with ferns, wild azaleas, and flowering dogwood.
Over 40 years ago, long before there was a Native Plant Society of Texas, I discovered that those Piney Woods plants can be good landscape plants.
Our backyard in Tyler had many trees, shrubs, and flowers that were transplanted from the nearby woods. One of our favorites was the American beautyberry or, as we called it in East Texas, the French mulberry.
After we moved to New Orleans, I continued the practice of landscaping with native plants, American beautyberry among them.
When we moved to the Boerne area several years ago, I was surprised to see a healthy growth of American beautyberry at the Cibolo Nature Center. I thought this was an eastern plant that needed acid soil.
I was pleased to learn that this area is within their western range. What pleased me even more was to find American beautyberry for sale at local nurseries.
As I learned through the years, American beautyberry is easy to transplant and grows in all sorts of soil. It seems to be fairly drought-tolerant if grown in the shade, but the leaves commonly look droopy in the midday summer heat.
Beautyberries grown in sunny areas require more water. During the severe drought a couple of years ago, our beautyberry temporarily defoliated. In late fall, leaves on our large beautyberry may turn bright yellow, but they do not do that every year.
American beautyberries in the wild seem to escape extensive browsing by deer. I don’t trust the deer in our subdivision; so I put a protective circle of wire fence around the small American beautyberries we planted this year.
Incidentally, fencing around young plants is a necessary nuisance if we are to have a variety of natives in our yard. At first the fences were distracting, but after awhile, they became “invisible,” and now we only see the plants.
Instructions for the care of American beautyberry are available free at nurseries participating in Operation NICE!: Hill Country African Violets and Nursery, Boerne in Bloom Garden Center, Where Wild Things Grow (Leon Springs), Barkley’s Nursery Center, and Fair Oaks Nursery.
