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Beautyberry’s English experience

2009 December 3
Beautyberry-by-Catesby

Mark Catesby’s colored illustration of the “garish purple” berries of American beautyberry.

By Ken Moore

I am grateful to a loyal reader of the Citizen for passing on to me Andrea Wulf’s The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession, published last year. This account of the lives and passions of pioneer plant explorers and avid gardeners of the 18th and 19th centuries is engaging reading. Just a few nights ago, I was captivated by a copy of Mark Catesby’s color illustration of American beautyberry.

English plant explorer Mark Catesby is credited with introducing our native beautyberry, Callicarpa americana, to England in 1724. Wealthy English merchant Peter Collinson, with an obsession for growing plants, also received specimens of beautyberry from Philadelphia farmer John Bartram, who had made collections from his travels in South Carolina.

With Collinson’s financial help, Catesby published the colored drawings and written accounts of his American travels, Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, in a 10-part series from 1729 to 1748. His illustration of beautyberry caught the attention of English gardeners eager for new plants from America. His verbal description was equally engaging: “a highly unusual plant which wore its garish purple berries around its branches like bead bracelets.”

Though Collinson succeeded in bringing this American shrub to fruit, the English climate did not favor it for extended periods. As Phillip Miller, another avid English gardener, whose 1731 first edition of Gardeners Dictionary became the standard botanical/horticultural reference for gardeners worldwide, noted in his 1768 edition, “they had flowered, but to the great frustration of gardeners had failed to produce the desirable bright purple berries.”

Sadly, English gardeners today must rely on the smaller-berried oriental callicarpas, which, in my perspective, pale in contrast to our coastal North Carolina native.

Those “garish purple” berries are still holding on as we head into December, I think because we have not yet had serious killing frosts. There is a particularly spectacular planting of them over in the woodland gardens just west of building five at the Carol Woods Retirement Community.

The friendship established across the Atlantic between Collinson and Bartram was steadfastly affectionate, while at times testy, as their numerous correspondences attest. Collinson came to depend on Bartram as the most reliable source for cuttings and seeds of American plants and Bartram depended upon Collinson for financing plant explorations and providing botanical/horticultural texts not otherwise available to him.

Collinson was the center of many such collaborative friendships. Stories of worldwide plant adventures, including the travels of Captain Cook, and the subsequent successes and failures of English gardeners with new plants are enriching for wildflower enthusiasts and gardeners alike.

Beautyberry-at-Carol-Woods

“Garish purple” beautyberry still showing off in Carol Woods. Photo by Ken Moore.

By mid-18th century, plants were eagerly exchanged back and forth across the Atlantic. And, early on, enthusiasm for growing exotic foreign plants was tempered a little by concern for potential dangers. When yellow toadflax, Linaria vulgaris, a much-loved flower in Britain, invaded the landscape like a weed, Bartram was worried about the havoc. So today, as we are aware of the havoc of plants like Norway maple and paper mulberry, gifts to Bartram from his English patrons, we also are appreciative of many plants shared by early gardeners that do remain well behaved within our garden gates.

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