Beautyberry, Callicarpa americana

Each cluster of purple berries is about as big as a lemon. And each beautyberry shrub has dozens of clusters: a fruit-eating bird’s dream.

 In addition to providing food for birds (our resident mockingbird has occupied the bush and gorges herself several times each day), the bruised leaves of this shrub produce mosquito-deterring chemicals, making it a good shrub to turn to when under mossie assault in the woods

These photos are from our garden. In the wild, this species prefers the lower elevation limestone slopes over the sandstone uplands.

1 thought on “Beautyberry, Callicarpa americana

  1. Pingback: Migrant thrush | Ramble

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s