#11 Caring for Mother Nature: Beautyberries

Greetings, readers. Today we continue our series, Caring for Mother Nature, by my friend, the author and naturalist, Peggy Sias Lantz. This time, we learn about some gorgeous berries. As it turns out, my husband, Hoyt, and I have a large Beautyberry bush in our front yard. As I write this, it is loaded with the bright purple beautyberries that Peggy describes. They’re in the featured photo.

Beautiful Beautyberry

by Peggy Lantz

This time of year, beautyberry bushes are the most beautiful plants in my yard. Ripe beautyberries are a gorgeous purple color and grow in clusters the size of Ping-Pong balls up and down the stems.  They have recovered well after clearing the land for my piney woods restoration, too. There was no need to install new plants. They came back from the seed bank still in the soil.

Beautyberry features and eaters

Beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) is a native shrub with woody stems six to eight feet tall. The delicate lavender flowers are not very showy because they hide in the notch between the leaves and the stems. But the berries are ve-e-e-ry showy, though each berry in the cluster is only about the size of a BB.

The birds enjoy them a lot. One year I had a beautyberry bush hanging over the edge of the driveway, and every morning for days when I went out to pick up the newspaper, there would be a mockingbird hanging upside down on a stem gorging on the berries.

And one year the beautyberry bush just outside our dining room window was loaded with berries. As Don and I were enjoying lunch, I commented that I needed to go pick them to make jelly. But while we sat there watching, a flock of robins migrating northward descended upon the bush and stripped it of every berry!

The berries hang on the bush all winter, too, giving the birds something to eat when autumn nuts and seeds are depleted and spring insects have not yet begun to hatch out.

Don complained about the bushes because in late winter they were long stems with only a few yellowed leaves at the tip. So when the berries are gone, I cut the stems off a foot or two high, and they’re soon growing bright green leaves again. [Don was Peggy’s dear husband, now deceased.]

Making Beautyberry jelly

Not only are these plants beautiful, they make wonderful jelly, and the jelly is beautiful, too. If you have some of these bushes, try it. But please, don’t pick all the berries. Leave some for the birds and for propagating new bushes. I gather them by holding my container under the cluster of berries and wiggling my fingers around them to rub them off, leaving some in each cluster.

You’ll need about 1 1/2 quarts of berries. Wash them and pick out leaves and stems. Put them in a large kettle, add two quarts of water, and simmer them for about 20 minutes. Then hang them in cheesecloth to drip over a bowl overnight. I usually squeeze the bag in the morning to extract more juice. Sterilize your jelly jars and have 4 1/2 cups of sugar and a box of pectin (Sure Jell) ready. Put three cups of the juice (add a little water if you need a bit more juice) in that big kettle, add the pectin, and bring it to a rolling boil. Add the sugar, bring to a hard boil again—one that cannot be stirred down—for exactly one minute. Remove from heat and pour into your jars. It’ll make five or six half-pints.

[Peggy added this note to this article when it was put in her church’s newsletter: “I will bring a jar of beautyberry jelly and some crackers to the fellowship time after the 11 o’clock service this Sunday.”]

—END—

Thanks for reading!

Your writer on the wing,

Charlene