Piratebush

Size, growth and what to expect

No source rates its growth, and the site carries no relative of the sandalwood family, so our growth estimator uses its medium rate, about a foot and a half a year. It makes a lax, wide-spreading shrub 6 to 12 feet tall, with smooth, light brown bark and green twigs. Its pale green, lance-shaped leaves run 1 to 2.5 inches long.

Small greenish flowers open in April and May at the tips of the new shoots, the male ones in little clusters and the female ones single, with four narrow green bracts. On female plants the fruit ripens in August and September, a fleshy, one-seeded oval about an inch long, turning from green to yellow-orange with the four bracts still at its tip.

It grows wild only in the Blue Ridge and the nearby Ridge and Valley of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, between about 1,500 and 3,600 feet. Its home is shallow, rocky soil on slopes and bluffs, in hemlock, pine and oak woods, often with rosebay rhododendron.

How to grow Piratebush

Piratebush takes part shade and grows most vigorously where more sun reaches it. It wants a shallow, rocky, well-drained soil. In the wild it grows on dry outcrops, slopes and river bluffs. It needs a host tree within reach of its roots, most often eastern hemlock, though pot-grown seedlings have attached to 19 different kinds of trees. Plant it 6 feet from a wall and set plants 6 feet apart. At its size it can go within 15 feet of overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant it close beside the host tree, in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper, and put the native soil back in. It is hard to raise, because a young plant's roots attach to a host only with difficulty. Seed sprouts only after a damp spell, so sow it in fall, outdoors near the roots of a host tree. Seedlings live for a while on the food stored in the seed, then need a host's roots to draw on. Cover the sown seed with wire, since animals eat much of the seed in the wild.

Water weekly through the first summer if rain is short. Browsing animals eat young shoots, so cage young plants. It spreads by underground stems.

Plants are male or female, and only females bear fruit, so plant three or more seedlings for a male and a female. Its most frequent host, eastern hemlock, is being lost to the hemlock woolly adelgid, though piratebush can use other trees. A rust fungus that also grows on Virginia pine infects piratebush.