Dangleberry

Size, growth and what to expect

Dangleberry grows slowly, about a foot a year in our growth estimator. It makes a slender, freely branched shrub of 2 to 6 feet and 2 to 5 feet across, and it spreads into colonies. Its underground stems run in the top 2 inches of soil and send up shoots from 3 inches to 6 feet apart.

Small greenish white to pink bells hang two to four together on long, slender stalks from March to June. The berries ripen from June into August, a quarter to a third of an inch across. Wild turkeys, bobwhite, mourning doves, catbirds and scarlet tanagers eat them. Black bears, gray foxes, raccoons and fox squirrels take them too. It is also a host plant of Henry's elfin butterfly.

It grows wild from southern New Hampshire to South Carolina, mostly on the Atlantic Coastal Plain and less often on the Piedmont. Its home is sandy pine barrens and flatwoods, dry oak woods, and the edges of shrub swamps and pocosins.

How to grow Dangleberry

Dangleberry is most productive in full sun, and it takes the part shade of open pine and oak woods. It needs an acid, sandy soil low in nutrients, pH 3.8 to 5.5, and it will not take lime. It thrives in damp soil that drains, takes an occasional wet spell and tolerates drought. Set plants 3 feet apart and keep them 3 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 mulch with pine straw or oak leaves, clear of the stems. Treat the seed like black huckleberry seed, warm and damp for a month and then cool for two, around 45 to 50 degrees. Sow it on the surface of a damp peat and sand mix. Black huckleberry seed comes up slowly and sparsely this way.

Water weekly through the first summer if rain is short, then only in a long drought. Deer and rabbits browse it only lightly. It needs no fertilizer and little pruning. If an old colony bears poorly, cut it to the ground in late winter, and it sprouts back from its underground stems.

Its flowers cannot pollinate themselves and depend on bumblebees and small bees. Its relatives set more fruit with pollen from another plant, so plant two or more seedlings from different parents. It has no serious pests or diseases. In burned pine woods it bore no fruit the first year after the fire and the most in the third.