WehadaBayberry…itsaboy

I spent my afternoon sexing Morella pensylvanica, Northern Bayberry. That sounds cheeky, but it really just means determining which plant is male, and which is female. In sciencey terms, this is called dioecious, where a species’ flowers are either male or female. Sometimes on plants this is fairly easy to determine, but for certain species, the flowers are very inconspicuous, or they don’t look much like flowers at all! Willows come to mind, as do Bayberry. 

As for what this means to the non-botanists among us, if you want lovely berries, and the plant is dioecious, you will need at least one male plant for every 5 or so females, in order for the female plants to produce berries. If you have, say, a winterberry in your yard that never produces those beautiful red berries, you either have a male, OR you have a female with no male in vicinity! 

This “sexing” process can be tricky, you have to catch the flowers at the right time, and you have to be able to recognize the flower parts. Since I was working on the Bayberries, we will talk about the flower differences with them! 

The flowers (catkins) for the Bayberry grow up the stem of the plant, and there are certain characteristics that define male versus female. The male catkins have a yellowish-green color, and are slightly larger than the female counterparts. Female catkins have no petals or sepals, so they tend to look like skinny little spikelets coming off the stem. Of course, the easiest way to distinguish a female plant is the presence of the downy green berries forming on the stem in late May/early June. In the photos below, you can see the male catkin on the left, and the female with resultant berries on the right. 

Just to add a layer of complication, not all berrying plants are dioecious, and some plants are more easily fertilized than others, so it may seem

 as though they are self-fertile, when really, they are just close enough to other plants. Aronia ssp comes to mind as a monoecious plant (self-fertilizing), while Lindera benzoin (Spicebush) and Sambucus (Elderberry) are dioecious, but are so high in number that they are easily fertilized in the wild. 

Getting back to the Bayberry, we have gone through our current stock and marked those which we are certain are female, certainly male, or questionably male. When you come in to purchase, you can choose the pink tagged plants for females with berries, and at least one male plant for every 5 or so females. The more males you plant, generally speaking, the more prolific your females will produce.