Aromatic bayberries shrubs make excellent background

Finally buds are swelling, leaves unfolding. I stroll through Marjorie’s garden with my morning coffee, stopping at each tree and shrub to note the progress made since yesterday. The red elders are advancing rapidly, clusters of purple flower buds surrounded by emerging leaves at the tip of each stem. They look like miniature broccoli heads.

I stop at the bayberries and remember the day last summer when we planted them. Soon I will not be able to walk by one of these shrubs without crushing a leaf between my fingers and savoring the spicy scent. This is why we grow them, and for their foliage texture and color and for the waxy, bayberry-scented berries that cluster along the stems of the female plants.

With planting season fast approaching, it is a good time to reflect on the garden worth of foliage plants such as bayberry. In fact, northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica), sweetgale (Myrica gale), and sweetfern (Comptonia peregrina), all belong to a family of garden-worthy native plants with fragrant foliage, the Myricaceae. (This family also includes the southern waxmyrtle (M. cerifera), a shrub that I remember with fondness from my gardening days in South Carolina.)

Northern bayberry is a semi-evergreen species native from Newfoundland to Maryland. It grows in the coastal region of Maine, often within the reach of salt-water spray, where it forms immense rounded colonies due to its suckering nature. In cultivation it is often used in poor sandy soils where few other plants will grow.

For a striking plant combination in autumn, interplant bayberry with one of the native roses, either the Carolina rose (Rosa carolina) or Virginia rose (R. virginiana). The dark green foliage of bayberry makes an excellent background for the deep red leaves and bright red hips of the rose.

All parts of northern bayberry are aromatic when crushed. Its waxy gray berries, produced in abundance along the young stems of female plants, have been used in making bayberry candles. The fruit appears in fall and may persist all winter. The lustrous, leathery, green leaves have also been used for making a gray-green dye.

Sweetgale is a deciduous low-growing shrub, to 4 feet in height, with suckering roots. It inhabits swamps and pond-sides throughout the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, often found growing in dense thickets, its glossy blue-green to dark green leaves making the perfect background for wildflowers such as cardinal flower, Lobelia cardinalis. It can be successfully grown, however, in average garden soils with moderate moisture. Only moderately shade tolerant, sweetgale prefers open spaces with plenty of sun. It forms an attractive natural hedge, either alone or in combination with other native shrubs such as mountain-holly (Nemopanthus mucronatus) and blueberry (Vaccinium sp.).

Colonies of sweetfern, consisting of low shrubs to 3 feet in height, grow in dry sandy soils along the coast of New England, in old abandoned fields and in woodland openings. Highly tolerant of shade, sweetfern grows best in poor acid soils. Not a true fern, its aromatic leaves are fernlike in appearance, often remaining dried on the plant through the winter. Like sweetgale, the narrow lobed leaves of sweetfern are covered with resin dots, the source of their spicy fragrance. During the Revolutionary War, American colonists used the leaves of sweetfern as a substitute for tea.

Many gardeners shy away from using sweetfern because of its vigorous colonizing habit. This characteristic can be used to advantage, however, where a tall groundcover is needed. For example, at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, sweetfern covers the ground beneath the canopy of a multitrunk white birch.

I have grown all three of these native shrubs in my gardens over the years. Each provides cause to stop for a moment on my morning strolls, to breathe in the fragrance of a crushed leaf.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to reesermanley@shead.org. Include name, address and telephone number.