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When European settlers first arrived in America, one of the gifts of the land they discovered was the bayberry shrub, growing in profusion along the coast. Necessity may be the proverbial “mother of invention,” but I’d still love to know who figured out that if you boiled up a kettle of bayberries, the waxy coating on the tiny (1/8th inch) fruits would separate out to the surface where it could be skimmed off and made into candles.
More recently, back in the early 1960s, being of a mind to learn how to live off the land, my best friend Valerie and I were excited to find a stand of bayberry shrubs growing in a wild area we were exploring. We started harvesting the berries to make candles.
The bushes were a bit of a bike ride from our neighborhood, picking the berries was slow going, and we eventually lost interest in the project. Probably a good thing, although we didn’t know it then: it takes fifteen pounds of the berries to yield a pound of wax. Unless you were well off or could make them yourselves, bayberry candles would have been a luxury. The cheaper alternative was to use tallow, which didn’t smell great to start with and could turn rancid.
An old New England custom was to burn a single bayberry candle on Christmas Eve and a second one on New Year’s Eve. Legend had it that,
“A bayberry candle,
Burned to the socket,
Brings food to the larder
And gold to the pocket.”
Candles and customs aside, northern bayberry (Myrica pennsylvanica , also classified as Morella pennsylvanica) has a lot to recommend it. While it prefers sandy, dry, infertile soils that are somewhat acidic, it can tolerate a variety of soils and moisture conditions. It does well in full sun to partial shade. The berries are a food source for many birds, including chickadees, catbirds, bluebirds, red-bellied woodpeckers, and tree swallows. If allowed to form a thicket, the shrubs provide great shelter. Bayberry is also the larval host plant of the Columbia silkmoth. (edgeofhtewoodsnursery.com). Bayberries are dioecious, so if you hope to get berries, you’ll need at least one male plant to pollinate the female plants. Note: Bayberry fruits are poisonous to humans.
The Penn State Extension website offers this information:
“Northern Bayberry, Morella pensylvanica, is distributed all along the mid-Atlantic coastal regions of North America, where it forms clumps that help stabilize dunes. While commonly found along the coast, this native shrub thrives from Newfoundland to North Carolina and west to Ohio. It grows in USDA plant hardiness zones 3a through 8b.
“Usually, coastal bayberry plants are only one to two feet tall. Inland bayberry typically reaches five to six feet, occasionally as tall as 10 feet. Its multiple stems form a mounded shape. Under ideal conditions, bayberry creates colonies by suckering. This feature makes it suitable as an informal hedge, privacy screen, or bank for erosion control. Because this shrub commonly grows along the coast, it tolerates wind and salt. Thus, bayberry is ideal for planting along highways treated with salt in the winter.” (https://extension.psu.edu/bayberry)
The same article states that, “Deer rarely damage bayberry plants.” Yet at www.phillyorchards.org, it says that while deer don’t like the strong smell of the leaves and will leave the plants alone most of the year, “the Northern bayberry loses its leaves in the winter, and once the killing frosts arrive, deer will munch the stems of your bayberries right to the ground.”
I did some further searching and learned that in the southern part of the plant’s range, they tend to be at least semi-evergreen; I just don’t know where that line of demarcation is. If you have experience with bayberry shrubs in the greater Philadelphia area and can speak to this, please email me at pamelacbaxter@gmail.com.
Note: Bayberry candles are still expensive, and it can take some searching to find ones that are made of bayberry wax; many are simply “bayberry scented.”
Pam Baxter is an avid organic vegetable gardener who lives in Kimberton.
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