Shadblow Serviceberry

Size, growth and what to expect

It grows at a medium pace, about a foot and a half a year in our growth estimator. It grows 6 to 25 feet tall and 15 to 20 feet wide. In the wild it can reach about 30 feet. A sapling bears its first fruit 2 to 3 years after planting.

White flowers open from March to May in erect clusters, before the leaves are half unfolded. The berries turn from green to red to purplish black between May and July, sweet and juicy, a quarter to three eighths of an inch across. Orioles, cardinals, thrushes, catbirds, waxwings, robins, squirrels and chipmunks eat them. The leaves turn orange-red in fall.

It grows wild on the Atlantic Coastal Plain and Piedmont from Maine to Georgia, and inland to Tennessee, in swamps, bogs, wet thickets and damp woods. It is abundant in the forested wetlands around Chesapeake Bay. It is one of the earliest trees to flower each spring.

How to grow Shadblow Serviceberry

Shadblow serviceberry grows in full sun or part shade, and in the South it welcomes afternoon shade. It likes a moist, acid, sandy loam, and it takes wet ground, clay and moderate drought. Set trees 12 feet apart, and keep each one 15 feet from a wall and 15 feet from 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 an inch clear of the stems. Clean the seed out of the fruit as soon as it ripens, before the pulp ferments. Sow cleaned seed outdoors in fall a quarter inch deep, under a mulch. For spring, hold it damp in the refrigerator for 90 to 120 days first. Many seeds wait until the second spring to come up.

Water regularly through the first summer, and after that only in droughts. The thin bark scars easily from mowers and string trimmers, so keep a mulch ring around the stems. Deer seldom damage it badly, but a wire guard keeps rabbits off young stems. Prune only to thin crowded stems, and pull suckers unless you want a thicket.

A lone tree can set fruit with its own pollen, but a second tree from different seed raises the crop, so plant two or more. Birds strip the berries as they ripen, so net a branch if you want some. Rust, leaf spot and powdery mildew can mark the leaves, but the damage is mostly cosmetic. Sawflies, leaf miners and borers sometimes feed on it.