GREEN Vision
By Mengmeng Gu, Ph.D.
Plants with Potential: Farkleberry
I HAVE WRITTEN about several plants from my native land of China in previous issues of TNLA Green. This column will focus on a plant from “the Great Aggieland,” where I’ve been transplanted. In the College Station area during the early winter, plants with nice red foliage are mainly Bradford pear (Pyrus calleryana), Chinese tallow tree (Triadica sebifera; syn. Sapium sebiferum), and Chinese pistache (Pistacia chinensis). Although we love their gorgeous fall color, we worry about invasiveness, except the male Chinese pistache trees (for the obvious reason).
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... berry loss during mechanical harvest is reduced since farkleberry has a single trunk instead of being bushy. Farkleberry flowers have shorter tubes and wider openings, making it easy for insect pollination and fruit set. A casual stroll around the neighborhood last year introduced me to a gorgeous native plant, farkleberry, also called sparkleberry (Vaccinium arboreum). My neighborhood is one of those subdivisions carved out of native vegetation, which still exists, right beyond the mowing line. It was December, and yaupon hollies (Ilex vomitoria) were proudly presenting their shiny red berries. Not much was going on other than
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TNLA Green January/February 2019
that. Suddenly, a ball of fire — a roundshaped shrub covered in red foliage — caught my attention among the yaupon hollies (See Figure 1.). Farkleberry, native to the Southeast United States, is a close relative of a well-known fruit, blueberry (high bush blueberry V. corymbosum or rabbiteye
blueberry V. ashei). Small black round farkleberries are about one-quarter inch in diameter (See Figure 2.). They are seedy, not juicy and taste nothing like blueberry. It is like chewing sand. But it seems like birds don’t have any problem with that (See Figure 3.). If it doesn’t taste good, what is it
