Bog Spicebush

Size, growth and what to expect

No source rates its growth, so our growth estimator treats it as a medium grower, like our spicebush, about a foot and a half a year. It makes an upright shrub about 6 feet tall, and up to 13 feet in shade. Its leaves are 1.6 to 3 inches long, thick and somewhat leathery, dark green above and pale and hairy beneath.

Clusters of small, pale yellow flowers open on bare twigs from February to April, before the leaves. Female plants carry oval, bright red fruit about 0.4 inch long from July to September. Birds readily eat the fruit. The young leaves smell faintly of lemon when crushed, and older ones have almost no scent.

It grows wild in seepage bogs, pocosins, bayheads and streamhead thickets, usually with sphagnum moss. Most wild stands hold only one to five separate plants, each spreading by root suckers. Fire once kept taller shrubs from shading them, and some stands have been lost without it.

How to grow Bog Spicebush

Bog spicebush grows in part shade or in the sun of open bogs. It needs acid, peaty soil that stays wet all year, like the seepage bogs where it grows wild. Set plants 5 feet apart and keep them 5 feet from a wall. At its size it can go within 15 feet of overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant them dormant, from leaf fall until bud swell, in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper. Set the crown at the soil line, put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the stems. Sow it as spicebush is sown. Clean the seed from the red berries and sow it outdoors in fall, a quarter to half an inch deep under mulch, before it can dry out. For a spring sowing, keep it in damp sand in the refrigerator for three to four months.

Keep it watered in any dry spell, since it grows wild in ground that never dries out. It needs no pruning, since root suckers replace the old stems in time.

Male and female flowers grow on separate plants and only females carry berries, so plant three to five seedlings to get both. Wild stands spread by root suckers and are often all male or all female, which lowers their chance of setting seed. Bees and flies carry the pollen of its relative spicebush. Laurel wilt, a fungus carried by an introduced beetle, blocks the water-conducting wood of laurel family plants, so the leaves wilt and the plant can die. It infects bog spicebush, though a 2015 review found no sign of it in Florida's wild stands. Remove any plant that wilts suddenly in summer, and never move firewood.