Photo: Agnieszka Kwiecień, Nova, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Common Hackberry
Celtis occidentalis
Also called northern hackberry, nettle tree, beaverwood, false elm.
Sole host of the hackberry emperor and American snout, with sweet fruit held for waxwings and bluebirds until March; a tough tree for dry or city ground.
Wildlife valueDrought tolerantTolerates shadeEdible
- Type
- Large tree
- Mature height
- 40–60 ft
- USDA zones
- 3–9
- Growth rate
- Medium
- Sun
- Full · Part · Shade
- Soil moisture
- Average · Dry
210
Common hackberry is a broad, elm-like tree of river bottoms, limestone bluffs and rocky hillsides from Maine and Quebec west to the Dakotas and south to Texas and Georgia; in the Mid-Atlantic it is rare near the coast and at home inland along rivers and on limestone. The bark grows corky warts and ridges, the leaves are lopsided at the base with a long tapered tip, and the April flowers are tiny and green. The pea-sized fruit ripens dark purple in September and hangs on, thin-fleshed and sweet, into March, carrying cedar waxwings, robins, bluebirds, mockingbirds and flickers through the winter; raccoons and fox squirrels eat it too. The leaves feed the hackberry emperor, the tawny emperor and the American snout, whose caterpillars eat nothing but hackberry, and the question mark and mourning cloak. Perfect for a dry bank, a limy lot or a street-side lawn that needs a tough shade tree.
It is overlooked because it is plain: dull yellow fall color, flowers nobody notices, and leaves that often carry nipple galls, small green bumps raised by a tiny jumping plant louse that do no harm but make it a hard sell, so it is more common on Midwestern streets than in eastern yards. One tree carries both male and female flowers, so it fruits alone in most years. It is deep-rooted and drought-hardy, stands periods of flooding but not year-round wet ground, and lives 150 to 200 years.
How to grow Common Hackberry
Common hackberry takes full sun to fairly deep shade, zones 3 through 9. It grows fastest on deep, moist, neutral to limy loam, accepts clay, gravel and drought, and is slow on poor dry ground. It stands periodic flooding once grown, but not saturated ground as a seedling. It reaches 40 to 60 feet tall and about as wide, so keep it 25 feet from the house and clear of wires, and off the patio, where the fruit would drop for months.
Plant a dormant sapling, bare-root or potted, between leaf fall and bud swell, in a hole twice the width of the roots and no deeper, root flare at grade, native soil back in, mulch ring kept off the bark. It moves easily, with no strong taproot. Seed keeps for years dry and cold: clean the pulp off and sow half an inch deep in a screened bed in fall, or hold it damp in the refrigerator for 60 to 90 days and sow in spring.
Water deeply once a week through the first summer. Deer browse young hackberry where they are thick, and rabbits and mice chew young stems, so cage or tube it for three years and keep mulch thin at the trunk against voles. Prune only in winter, to keep one leader and remove crossing limbs; the branch tips droop with age, which is natural.
Growth is medium: a foot or more a year on good ground at first, slow on a dry bank. One tree carries flowers of both sexes, so it fruits alone and bears most years. Expect nipple galls on the leaves and sometimes witches' brooms, dense twig clusters at the branch tips raised by a mite and a mildew; neither harms the tree. It is not for salt spray or seaside ground.
Heights and zones are typical ranges for the species in cultivation; local conditions and seed source shift them.
- Six trees not to plant near a house, and what to plant instead
- Pruning at the branch collar, and when to make the cut
- Native trees and shrubs for butterflies and moths: host plants first, nectar second
- Native trees and shrubs for wildlife: what deer, squirrels, bears, bats, turtles and salamanders actually get from a planting
- Ten planting mistakes that quietly kill trees
More like this
