Japanese Barberry

What’s blooming: Purple aster; peach twigs have larger fuzzy, silvery buds.

What’s still green: Arborvitae, juniper and other evergreens, Siberian elms at lower level, globe willow, apples, Lady Banks, hybrid tea and floribunda roses, prickly pear, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, red hot poker, grape hyacinth, west-facing iris, bouncing Bess, beardtongues, Jupiter’s beard, large-leaved soapwort, sea pink, snapdragon, salvias, catmints, alfalfa, white sweet and purple clovers, sweet pea, oxalis, hollyhock, winecup, oriental poppy, basal blue flax leaves, baptisia has some black edges, bindweed, Saint John’s wort, yellow evening primrose, vinca, alfilerillo, stick leaf, tumble mustard, pigweed, snakeweed, dandelion, Mexican hat, purple coneflower, anthemis, coreopsis, perky Sue, Shasta daisy, black-eyed Susan, June, pampas, brome, needle and cheat grasses.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, pinks, snow-in-summer, loco weed, yellow alyssum, California poppies, winterfat, Silver King artemisia, chocolate flower, golden hairy aster.

What’s red/turning red: Purple-leaved plum, raspberries, privet, barberry, cholla, small-leaved soapwort, pink evening primrose, coral bells, tansy.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Cottonwood still have live leaves near bottom, weeping willow, Apache plume, Rumanian sage, golden spur columbine, lady bells.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, asparagus fern, pomegranate, zonal geranium..

Animal sightings: Small birds foraging in drive.

Weather: Morning temperatures below 20 killed whatever wasn’t winterized, leaving trees with dead brown canopies; last rain 10/21/10; 10:18 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Japanese barberry is one of those plants I disliked as a child.

I knew the rounded purple leaves were crisp, that if you folded them they broke cleanly, exposing light-colored edges. You could fold and refold them, and continue to get the same effect.

I also learned early if you bit into one it was bitter.

When I snapped the red-skinned berries in half, their egg shapes were filled with something that looked like hard-boiled yoke. So far as I remember, I never tasted one.

Actually, the ripe fruits were probably safer to eat than the leaves which contain berberine, an isoquinoline alkaloid used as by the Chinese as a yellow dye and a cooling agent to treat fevers. The chemical, usually extracted from the bark, can be toxic in high concentrations.

While the individual parts were worthy of exploration, the whole plant was not. My mother had two hedges, one on each side of the property, intended to keep people from taking short cuts across our corner lot. She planted prickly, purple-flowered moss phlox underneath, a color combination that sounds quite appealing in words, but wasn’t, at least to this child.

The deciduous shrubs always seemed somehow meager. The furrowed brown stalks have no leaves, only thorns. At each spine junction, a small stem curves out with one or more alternating, smooth edged leaves. In 1917, Hans Koehler told readers of Country Life the dead wood was best left alone because removing it left a "sorry, naked looking thing."

Eventually I escaped to college, to jobs, to other towns and states, and never again thought about barberry. Even though it’s been colonizing farmland that reverted to forests in New Jersey, I don’t remember seeing any shrubs there in the late 1970's.

Then I returned to Michigan, and there was Japanese barberry, waiting. This time it was a green leaved form in a hedge down the street. I don’t remember how I knew it was a barberry, perhaps the leaf texture. The plants were fuller than my mother’s, but otherwise even more nondescript. That is until fall, when they turned brilliant orange, the best of all the autumn colors.

Then, I thought there might be a reason for barberry after all. Only, the green leaved species, Berberis thunbergii, is rarely sold. It was replaced by its burgundy-leaved spawn, altapurpurea, after the Renault Nursery released it in Orleans in 1913. Now all that’s commonly sold in the local stores is a dwarf developed by Van Eyck in Boskoop in the depths of the occupation of the second world war.

One reason the red is more available, beyond the predilection of landscaper designers for plants with varied foliage, is the green is seen as more invasive. However, that may be deceptive. In greenhouse conditions, 14% of germinated altapurpurea seedlings revert to green; in the wild, 50% of the survivors have green leaves.

The light-reflecting red is a defense against bright sun and more necessary in open meadows than forests. Young leaves open green, then develop their darker color. The more light a plant receives, the better the color.

Japanese barberry tolerates soils with pH’s ranging from 5.5 to 7.2, but is mentioned more from alkaline areas. Tatemi Shimizu found reports it grows on exposed limestone or limestone soils on mountains and beneath cliffs on Honshu, on mountains and limestone plateaus on Shokoku, and on mountains on Khyshu island.

The northeast was covered by ice in the last glacial advance. The subsequent vegetation included coniferous forests and broad-leaved evergreens that thrive on acidic soil. Much of the complaint has been that, when farms were abandoned, they did not revert to that prelapsarian landscape, but instead fostered exotics.

People forget. Farming changes the land. Men use vegetation to clear the sites most likely to support crops. They add nitrogen and phosphorus. Earth worms eat dead matter, moving it from the surface into the soil where it sweetens the pH. Soil fertility’s maintained to feed people living in cities.

The mere presence of earth worms aerating the soil has been triggering anxiety since 1994 when John Reynolds noted the southern advance of the Wisconsin glacier coincided with the northern boundary of native worms. Worms were not part of that native northeast vegetation. Any worms in the north east are aliens with European ancestors who are subverting the indigenous forests.

There were calls to ban the shrub. The government had begun eradicating another barberry species, vulgaris, in 1918 because it was an alternate host to a wheat fungus. Why not this one?

It attracts foreign worms. White-tailed deer won’t eat it. It takes advantage of early spring light to do most of its growing before the leafy canopy forms. Its larger, shallow root masses can survive with fewer nutrients.

Horticulturalists rallied to defend a plant that brings in so much revenue to their constituents, some five million in retail sales in Connecticut alone. Scientists at the local ag school found little genetic evidence that altapurpurea had contributed to the feral population in southern New England in 2008. They also noted Crimson Pygmy produced fewer six-petaled yellow flowers that turned into fertile seeds, and when the rough-textured seeds did germinate, the seedlings were less vigorous than other cultivars.

And so, when I wanted to try barberry for fall color, I was stuck with Crimson Pygmy. In autumn, the green barberry slows its photosynthesis so the chlorophyll disappears, revealing the anthocyanin pigments.

Apparently, when the red leaved variety prepares for winter, the anthocyanins themselves fade away, with the lower leaves turning tangerine first, while the upper ones retain some maroon overtones. Unfortunately, all the spots and blemishes also become prominent.

This week’s cold temperatures changed nothing. Like those from my childhood, dwarf barberries are best known in their parts.

Notes:
D’Appollonio, Jennifer. Regeneration Strategies of Japanese Barberry (Berberis thunbergii) in Coastal Forests of Maine, 1997, on farm land.

Koehler, Hans J. "Shrubs in the Garden Picture," Country Life in America, March 1917.

Lubell, Jessica D. and Mark H. Brand. "Germination, Growth and Survival of Berberis thunbergii DC. (Berberidaceae) and Berberis thunbergii var. atropurpurea in Five Natural Environments," accepted for publication by Biological Invasions in 2010, available on-line.

_____, _____ and Jonathan M. Lehrer, "AFLP Identification of Berberis thunbegii Cultivars, Inter-Specific Hybrids and Their Parental Species," Journal of Horticultural Science and Biotechnology 83:55-63:2008.

_____, _____, _____ and Kent E. Holsinger. "Detecting the Influence of Ornamental Berberis thunbergii var. atropurpurea in Invasive Populations of Berberis thunbergii (Berberidaceae) using AFLP," American Journal of Botany 95:700-705:2008.

Reynolds, J. W. "The Distribution of the Earthworms (Oligochaeta) of Indiana: a Case for the Post Quaternary Introduction Theory for Megadrile Migration in North America," Megadrilogica 5:13-32:1994.

Shimizu, Tatemi. "Studies on the Limestone Flora of Japan and Taiwan," Faculty of Textile Science and Technology, Shinshu University, Journal series A, 11:1-105:1963.

Stuart, George Arthur. Chinese Materia Medica, 1911, reprinted by Gordon Press, 1977; revision of Frederick Porter Smith’s 1871 translation of Pen T’sao Kan Mu, a 1578 herbal by Hubei physician and naturalist, Li Shi Zhen.

Photograph: Crimson Pygmy barberry, 7 November 2010.