Pondberry

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 a low shrub of 2 to 6 feet, a colony of mostly unbranched stems. Its drooping leaves are 2 to 6 inches long and softly hairy, and they turn clear yellow in fall where they get some sun.

Clusters of small, pale yellow flowers open on the bare stems from February to April, before the leaves. Female plants carry bright red, oval to round fruit about 0.4 inch long, ripe from late summer into October. Its stems first flower in their second to fourth year. Birds such as cardinals, thrashers and hermit thrushes eat the fruit, and the leaves feed spicebush swallowtail caterpillars.

It grows wild in seasonally flooded bottomland woods, the margins of sandy ponds and limesinks, and the edges of sphagnum bogs. It has not been seen in Florida or Louisiana for more than a century. Most colonies are clones of only a few plants.

How to grow Pondberry

Pondberry grows in shade or part shade, and in full sun where the ground stays wet. It wants soil that floods or stays soggy in spring, like the sandy ponds and swampy bottoms where it grows wild. Set plants 4 feet apart and keep them 4 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. Clean the seed from the red fruit and sow it outdoors in fall, a quarter inch deep. For a spring sowing, chill it damp in the refrigerator for two to four months first. In a seed laboratory test, 84 to 100 percent of chilled seed sprouted. The seed will not sprout while it lies under water. Seed sown in the wild has mostly failed, and seedlings are rarely found in wild colonies.

Keep the soil wet through its first summers and water in any dry spell. It spreads by runners into a colony of upright stems, and each stem usually lives six or seven years before young ones replace it.

Male and female flowers grow on separate plants and only females carry berries, so plant three to five seedlings to get both. Insects must carry the pollen from male to female flowers, and flies, wasps and small bees visit them. Most wild colonies are all male or mostly male, so many bear no fruit. Late frosts often kill the flowers and cut the crop. Laurel wilt, a fungus carried by an introduced beetle, is highly lethal to infected pondberry. It blocks the water-conducting wood so the leaves wilt, and it can pass through the roots to the other stems of a colony. By 2021 it had reached every state in pondberry's range except Missouri. Remove any plant that wilts suddenly in summer, and never move firewood. A fungus-like disease, Phytophthora cinnamomi, has also harmed pondberry grown in one botanical garden. Saplings and seed are shipped only in state and otherwise pickup only.