Friday Fabulous Fruit

Ripe fruit is of course a flower at the stage of seed dispersal.  And one of the nicest "flowering" shrubs in our gardens are the winterberries, which is a holly, (Ilex verticillata).  Now hollies do not have large attractive flowers, but the fruit display can be very vivid especially when contrasted against the green leaves.  Except winterberry is a deciduous native holly, so it drops its leaves leaving the brilliant red berries on display, where they will remain until discovered by migrating cedar waxwings or robins.  Like all hollies winterberry is also dioecious (2- houses), so you need "males" to pollinate the females.  TPP likes to plant a pollinator plant for every 3-4 fruiting plants.  Obviously the winterberries have not dropped their leaves yet, but you can see how bright the red berry display is anyways.  Unfortunately the berries are not edible for the basic human GI tract.  But they look great in a boarder planting.  The shrubs can grow to 3-4 meters tall in wet areas, but seldom get more than a meter or two in drier places.  They are not a finicky about soils as some hollies either.  

Fall color - Winterberry

Winterberry is a great landscape shrub for fall and winter color.  It's almost native to the upper midwest, but not quite, but it has no trouble growing here at all. It's actually a holly, a deciduous holly, Ilex verticillata. In particular the dwarf variety is a nicely compact, relatively slow growing shrub, rather unobtrusive until fall and then zowie! The bright red berries just light up the area, and eventually they will become bird fodder. They look particularly good in front of evergreens or other shrubs.  One small thing to note. Hollies are dioecious, so trees either bear fruiting flowers or pollen flowers not both, however you only need one male for every few females. For some reason the males are not as tough nor as hardy as the females and they tend to die a bit more frequently, but they can be pretty easily replaced. As one friend put it, the berries are so lovely they could be artificial. Not sure but TPP thinks that was a complement.

Suddenly deciduous

Last night it froze; the low temperature was 25 F.  Up until now only the lightest of frosts had happended, so lots of trees still have green leaves.  Under these circumstances a number of tree species will drop their leaves all at once including hackberry and black walnut, and most definitely ginkgo.  What causes tree leaves to drop is an abcission layer, an anatomically weak zone that forms in the fall at the base of the leaf stalk.  Trees like ginkgo still hang on to their leaves until a freeze, and then, perhaps as a result of ice crystal formation, the weak connection is broken and as the temperature goes up a few degrees, all the leaves fall at once.  TPP sort of wishes other trees did the same because then you'd be done with it, but some of our big trees hang on to leaves so tenaciously you end up raking in the spring.  The areas under the suddenly deciduous trees were just a carpet of dropped leaves this morning, and most people won't even notice. And leaves were still falling like rain.  Most other trees drop leaves more gradually as the abcission zone matures.  All trees drop leaves, but when they drop them all seasonally, they are deciduous.  Otherwise they are evergreen, which is not synonymous with conifers because some are deciduous.