CROSSROADS

Snowy berries to spot on snowy slopes

By Jessie BertaThompson Redstone Review

LYONS – Do you see a flash of white peeking out among the trailside scrub? Up close, a tight clump of white berries? The first snows have come for Lyons, and ripe snowberries are here, too. The plump, bright fruits of the snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus) stay on their twigs throughout the winter, or at least until the birds get to them.

This species grows in the hills around Lyons and across much of the U.S. (except the Southeast) and Canada. In Colorado, it can be found in dry slopes, forests, and meadows of the Front Range, from the foothills to 9,800 ft. The snowberry is a deciduous shrub that grows into low thickets. Its flowers are little pink to white bells, blooming in summer. Its leaves are small ovals that turn pale yellow in fall. On older branches, its bark forms fibrous shreds.

The botanical name for the snowberry genus, Symphoricarpos, grows out of two Greek roots, symphorein for ‘to be borne/carried together’ and karpos for ‘fruit’. Snowberry fruits tend to be in tight clusters at the ends of stems or where leaves meet stems. That karpos root shows up in many botanical names, like the red barberry (Berberis haematocarpa), an evergreen shrub with blood-colored berries, notable among its blue-fruited relatives.

Snowberry is in the honeysuckle family (Caprifoliaceae). Other members of this family growing wild in Colorado include twinberry (Lonicera involucrata), twinflower (Linnea borealis), and escaping honeysuckles introduced from Eurasia. Twin in the names is not a coincidence –many flowers in this family grow in pairs.

There are about a dozen species of snowberries across North and Central America and East Asia. Most have white berries, but the coralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus) has dazzling pink fruits.

Four species are native to Colorado, each adapted to a different habitat. The snowberry (S. albus) described above (also called white or common snowberry), favors dry, gravelly soil at moderate elevations. Wolfberry or western snowberry (S. occidentalis) grows near streams and lakes or in meadows, to 8,500 ft. (note, very different plants with edible berries in the genus Lycium are also called wolfberry). Desert snowberry (S. longiflorus) grows on dry, sandy slopes at the western edge of Colorado, with elongated pink flowers. Mountain snowberry (S. rotundifolius) is common across the western half of Colorado at higher elevations, from 5,500 to 11,000 ft.

The various snowberry species are toxic but nonetheless intensely meaningful and useful to indigenous peoples. Some tribes of the Pacific Northwest call these plants ghost or corpse berries, a colorless mirror of edible berries to serve as food for the dead. Farther south, among the Nez Perce their spiritual significance led to a practice of decorating cradleboards with snowberries to ward off ghosts.

The Navajo used snowberry leaves as a ceremonial emetic (a hint at the nature of its toxicity). Medicinally, berries and whole-plant decoctions were used by the Cree, Flathead, and Cowichan to treat skin ailments like rashes, sores and burns, among countless other uses by peoples across the continent. The Paiute made small arrows from the straight new shoots. There’s also a record of the Crow using snowberry as a horse laxative.

As European invaders moved into the American landscape, the plant quickly attracted their scientific and horticultural attention. Merriweather Lewis’s journal entry for August 13, 1805, when the Lewis and Clark expedition was near the IdahoMontana border, reported “a species of honeysuckle much in its growth and leaf like the small honeysuckle of the Missouri only rather larger and bears a globular berry as large as a garden pea and as white as wax.” Thomas Jefferson, in turn, was quite taken with the snowberry, planting (that is, getting his slaves to plant) some of the first cultivated specimens in his garden. He wrote to his nursery source, Bernard McMahon, on October 11, 1812, “one only of the cuttings of the Snowberry failed. the rest are now very flourishing and shew some of the most beautiful berries I have ever seen.”

Berta-Thompson

Snowberries continue to be popular garden plants, for their pretty fruits, hardiness, and wildlife value. Many native species, cultivars and hybrids with white or pink berries and various growth habits are available at nurseries. At the Rocky Mountain Botanic Gardens in Lyons, common snowberry plants installed last year have thrived, setting fruit abundantly and sending up perky new shoots via rhizomes. To deal with the plant’s gradual underground spreading, gardeners can do annual trimming or use this property to fill in challenging spaces. The plants like sun or part shade and are drought-tolerant. They feed bees and butterflies with summer blossoms, and birds in winter, as well as providing cover for small wildlife. Fruits brightly reflecting the Colorado winter sun, the snowberry valuable part of our landscape, in the mountain wilds or backyards.

Jessie Berta-Thompson studied algae in school, and loves gardening and learning about plants. She has a degree in biology. She currently serves as Treasurer on the Rocky Mountain Botanic Gardens board and as an Adjunct Researcher at the Denver Botanic Gardens, where she works on the diversity and evolution of Colorado mushrooms.

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