Bayberry
Morella pensylvanica
also called northern bayberry, candleberry, wax myrtle
The aromatic gray-green shrub of northeastern dunes and old fields, crusted along its stems with the waxy silver berries that scent bayberry candles, and tough enough for the salted street side.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- White
- Sunlight
- Full sun to light shade
- Watering
- Low
- Soil
- Poor sand, salt wind, roadside gravel; fertility optional
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 3a–7b
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- at the last spring frost
- Plant spacing
- 6 ft 7 in
- In-row spacing
- 4 ft 11 in
- Between rows
- 8 ft 2 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody and fibrous
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 12–16 ft across, about 1.5–2× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 20 in of soil
A shallow woody framework with the fine feeding roots in the leaf litter above it. Those feeders are mostly under the outer half of the canopy rather than against the stem, which is where water and feed should go.
Root nodules host Frankia bacteria and fix nitrogen from the air, so it thrives on sand and poor ground where nothing else will. It also suckers into a colony.
The habit is Bayberry’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- When
- Waxy berries in fall for candle-making, from female plants; otherwise nothing.
- What to look for
- Stems crusted with gray-white berries after the leaves thin.
- How to harvest
- Strip berries into a pot, boil, and skim the green wax off the cooled surface; it takes about four cups of berries to an ounce of wax, blended with beeswax for a burnable candle. Prune only to pull the colony back where it has wandered.
- How often
- One fall stripping, leaving plenty; the yellow-rumped warblers winter on what you spare.
- Storing the crop
- Skimmed wax keeps indefinitely. The shrub itself stores nothing and needs nothing.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
Like sweet-fern it fixes its own nitrogen, which is how it furnishes beach sand. Berries come only on female plants with a male nearby, and boiling them really does skim off a fragrant green wax: about a candle per shrub per year, which explains the price of the candles.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com