Berry Trees And Shrubs In Your Garden

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Mountain ash, barberry, chokeberry, hawthorn, irga and others …

Autumn is harvest time, thousands of townspeople go to their dacha on weekends to return with full baskets of fruits, vegetables and berries.

And even in a city of many millions, amid the hustle and bustle, nature generously shares its riches with people … Today we will talk about what kind of berry trees and bushes Petersburgers can meet on a walk.

Perhaps, most often we come across a mountain ash. Large clusters of red berries sway in the wind throughout the fall. A favorite character of Russian folklore, mountain ash was considered a symbol of happiness, good luck, peace and order in the family. That is why the rowan tree was necessarily planted near the house, in the garden.

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In the old days, it was believed that rowan branches are endowed with the ability to drive away evil spirits, protecting the house from evil spirits. And on September 23, according to the new style, an Orthodox holiday is celebrated - the Day of Peter and Paul the Fieldfare, when the first harvest of berries is harvested. Signs of the agricultural year, or as they would say now, phenological signs, were also associated with this tree.

Dozens of folk and modern songs, poems, fables are dedicated to rowan - many people of art drew inspiration from the discreet beauty of Central Russian nature. For the sake of fairness, we note that mountain ash is widespread throughout the world. Various species can be found in most of Europe, in the Urals and the Far East, in the Kuriles, in Japan and China.

Black chokeberry

On the territory of Russia alone, scientists have counted 43 species that differ in the height and thickness of the trunk, the color of the bark, and the size of the berries. The plant is considered very promising for breeding; many scientists, including I. V. Michurin, were engaged in the creation of hybrids. Among the unusual varieties and forms, one can note the Kene mountain ash with white berries, the winter-hardy elderberry mountain ash, reaching a height of only 2.5 meters, the Nevezhinskaya mountain ash, named after the village of the same name in the Vladimir region. Large berries of Nevezhinskaya mountain ash are absolutely not bitter.

Our beauty also finds a purely practical application - valuable wood is used in carpentry and turning, and berries are used to make cognac and vodka liqueurs, wine, soft drinks. To apple jam, mountain ash gives a unique freshness and aroma. But do not rush to pick only reddened berries in summer, mountain ash is most delicious in October, after the first frost.

Chokeberry with mountain ash has nothing in common, except for the name. Yes, and it is wrong, the correct name of the plant is black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa). A two-meter shrub of the Rosaceae family has elliptical leaves, which are especially beautiful in autumn, and seed-fruits of black berries with a bluish bloom. Chokeberry blooms at the very beginning of summer, bears fruit in September.

In recent years, an unpretentious shrub has been widely used in landscaping the streets of St. Petersburg and regional cities, chokeberry is considered a gas-resistant species, which allows it to be used to create lawns and hedges even on very busy city transport routes. For food, you can use only berries that have grown far from city smoke and smog - like most plants, blackberries accumulate harmful substances.

Chokeberry berries are a whole natural pharmacy, they contain a noticeable amount of nicotinic and ascorbic acids, riboflavin, sugars, tannins, vitamins and trace elements. Fruit preparations are used for the treatment and prevention of atherosclerosis and hypertension, as a multivitamin general tonic.

Snowberry - decoration of city squares

The viburnum Viburnum opulus is surprisingly beautiful in autumn dress. A tree or shrub of the honeysuckle family reaches a height of four to five meters, blooms in June, bears fruit in early autumn. Several types of viburnum are common in the forests of the middle and steppe zone of Russia, in the Caucasus, in Central Asia.

The fruit of the viburnum is called drupe, a bright red berry with a large flat bone is noticeably bitter, which not everyone likes. Like rowan berries, viburnum berries taste sweeter after freezing, the most impatient can put the bunches on the branches in the freezer for several days. By the way, in nature, berries from the viburnum do not crumble, hanging with red lanterns in a leafless winter forest. In frosty winters, viburnum serves as a delicacy for many forest dwellers, especially birds.

Steamed viburnum, aged under the lid for several hours, is also tasty. Fruits are valuable for their high content of vitamin C, invert sugar, vitamins P and K. From the fruit, you can make tasty and nutritious jams, compotes, jelly, fruit drinks. Viburnum is sometimes used in confectionery for the production of fillings for cakes and sweets, marmalade. It is also used in medicine in the form of a decoction of the bark, alcohol tincture of berries. In St. Petersburg, viburnum can be found on Rzhevka, the streets and squares of the Moscow region, among the new buildings in Kupchino.

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Barberry fruit

A low thorny shrub with small leaves - barberry - is also found on city streets. Botanists know about 180 species of barberry that grow on all continents except Australia and Antarctica. The appearance of the plant varies greatly depending on the species, conditions and place of growth. Fruits are just as varied in shape, color and size. The flowering of the shrub in the conditions of St. Petersburg falls on May, and by the fall, medium-sized elongated red berries have time to ripen.

Barberry is very decorative, easy to form, which allows you to build free-form hedges. Low-growing forms are used in the design of alpine slides and borders. He is not capricious in the city either - bushes dotted with many oblong berries can be found in the courtyards of many houses on Moskovsky Prospekt, in parks, on Dunaysky Prospekt, in Pavlovsk along the railway line.

The fruits of barberry are rich in vitamins and are good for health, but you can eat only berries that have grown far from the city. Let's repeat again - this rule applies to all plant foods. Barberry is used in traditional Caucasian cuisine, is a part of pilaf and many meat spices. It is also used in medicine among many peoples - sour berries increase appetite, contain antibiotics, lower blood pressure, and have antitumor activity.

Rowan in autumn dress

Less known to the townspeople is a shrub with bluish, dark purple berries - canadian irga Amelanchier canadensis. Irga is found only in artificial plantings, I have never met wild forms in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region. North America is considered the birthplace of Irgi; it became widespread in Europe only at the beginning of the 20th century. The plant blooms in May, in the middle of summer the berries turn red, but they still cannot be eaten - the mature fruits of the canadensis are black, covered with a bluish bloom.

They must be collected immediately after ripening, the fruits are short-lived, dry up and fall off quickly enough. Irga is photophilous, but surprisingly frost-hardy - a fragile-looking tree easily withstands fifty-degree frosts! Berries have a characteristic, unlike anything else, taste, used raw and in jams.

But the Symphoricarpos sp snowberry, which is often found in yards and squares, has absolutely white, really "snowy" berries. In fairness, we note that some types of snowberry have not white, but red fruits. In nature, the shrub is also found in North America, where botanists have counted 15 species.

Only one species grows in China, and the fruits are completely black. In the garden culture in Europe, the so-called white snowberry is used, up to one and a half meters high, with a rounded crown and small ovoid leaves. The berries collected in dense bunches reach a centimeter in diameter, stay on the bushes all autumn and even winter, preserving the decorative appearance of the bush after the leaves fall. In culinary terms, the berries are useless, but they are cute and funny when pressed. You can meet a plant in St. Petersburg everywhere, mainly in the yards.

Rose hips are a real treasure of vitamins

In new areas, the most common hawthorn Crataegus L. from the Rosaceae family. It was the hawthorn that was chosen by the gardeners as a very unpretentious plant that grows without problems even in large cities. Reaches a height of several meters, undemanding to the composition of the soil, illumination, tolerates drought and frost well. White inflorescences appear on the tree in spring and smell, to put it mildly, not very pleasant - small flowers attract flies for pollination.

Collected in small clusters, fruits up to a centimeter in diameter resemble small apples, the color is usually red, although there are also forms with yellow fruits. As they ripen, the "berries" soften, the shell surrounding the seeds resembles mashed potatoes in consistency. Hawthorn fruits taste inexpressive, but healthy - they contain up to 15% sugar, various organic acids, vitamins A and C.

Hawthorn fruits ripen at the end of September

You can make jam, jelly, jam from berries. But nevertheless, the main application of hawthorn fruits is in medicine - in dry form and in the form of alcohol tincture, hawthorn improves heart function, maintains its ability to effectively use oxygen, strengthens capillaries and arterial walls, and normalizes blood pressure.

Even on city streets in autumn, a lot of interesting things open up to the eyes of a naturalist. These are rosehip bushes dotted with large beautiful berries, honeysuckle fruits covered with a wax coating, black cherry berries, elegant "boxes" of euonymus of an unusual shape and even nuts! Just find at least a few minutes a day to distract yourself from worries, take a close look around … Good luck and new entertaining discoveries.