Winter fruits help feed animals, brighten landscape

For several years, I took ownership of a crab apple in Littlefield Garden, a ‘Donald Wyman’ with horizontal branches that spread twice as wide as tall. In October I took students of woody plants to visit this tree, to see clusters of bright red half-inch apples nested in green and yellow leaves. The leaves eventually dropped, but the apples persisted into December on naked branches, glazed in ice and capped with a dusting of snow, cardinal red in a white landscape.

In January or February, the apples thawed. Pine grosbeaks congregated in the branches of the old tree, taking bites of the soft apples, dropping the skins to form a red-brown shadow of the tree on the snow. My students and I would watch the feast, sad to see the apples gone but happy for the birds. We learned the value of persistent winter fruits.

There are other plants with persistent fruits to brighten our winter landscapes. From November until midwinter thaw, the red berries of winterberry holly, Ilex verticillata, a deciduous shrub, can be seen in local woods and gardens, as can the larger red fruits of the American cranberry viburnum, Viburnum opulus var. trilobum. Both of these provide late winter food for songbirds.

(A caveat regarding use of the cranberry viburnum: It is a preferred host of the viburnum leaf beetle. Many old shrubs in Maine have succumbed to this pest in recent years and others are likely to follow.)

Humans compete with the birds for the viburnum fruits, preserving them in jams or jellies with, I suspect, a lot of added sugar. After tasting these berries straight from the shrub, I understand why the birds eat them only as a last resort. I read that the winterberry fruits are also highly astringent and, as I think about it, I can recall winters in which the fruits of both plants were left to wither on the branches.

Not all persistent fruits are red and showy. The waxy gray berries of northern bayberry, Myrica pensylvanica, hug its twigs through the winter, eventually eaten by songbirds, waterfowl and shorebirds. These are the same berries that we harvest for scenting of bayberry candles.

Not all persistent fruits are berries. The pale-brown-to-red-brown seed heads of meadowsweet, Spiraea latifolia, persist through winter, extending the usefulness of this native shrub in the garden. And I love to watch the snow build up around the summersweet clethra, Clethra alnifolia, in Marjorie’s garden until only the uppermost dried seed heads remain exposed. I imagine a field mouse beneath the snow, snuggled close to the ground with a cache of seed, waiting for the thaw.

From a window close to the wood stove, I look out over Marjorie’s winter garden, a blanket of white punctuated with sedum and astilbe seed heads that mark the perennial bed, rigid upright seed stalks of clethra growing around the old pine. At the back of the garden, against the woods line, I barely make out the tips of young winterberry hollies we planted two summers ago; in my mind’s eye, I see them in fruit a few winters hence. I search the snow-covered landscape, looking for ‘Donald Wyman.’

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