Argh! Dealing with common names of plants makes me sound like a pirate.
Common names have some serious drawbacks because they are often misleading or otherwise inaccurate, leading to confusion.
Examples? What about “Cherokee rose,” Rosa laevigata, a rose that doesn’t have anything to do with the Cherokee tribe? It’s a plant from China.
Then there is “French mulberry,” Callicarpa americana, showing off its beautiful purple fruits recently, a plant neither from France nor related to mulberries.
“Box elder,” Acer negundo, is a common tree in the South, but it’s not an “elder.” It’s a true maple.
Other common names are just too ambiguous at times. When people say “red oak,” do they mean Quercus rubra or Quercus coccinea? Or something else?
Otherwise, one particular plant species may be known by a number of different common names. For example, the common short-needled pine that grows around here, and which botanists call Pinus echinata, has been variously named “yellow pine,” “spruce pine,” “bull pine,” “pitch pine” and “slash pine.”
Of course, some plants, such as many of the grasses and sedges, are rather obscure, difficult even for botanists to identify, and many of them just don’t even have a common name. Argh, indeed.
The common name for this week’s mystery plant is a pretty bad one, too. It suggests the plant is armed with thorns, which is not at all accurate.
It’s a deciduous shrub, or sometimes a small tree, bearing no thorns or stickers. The young twigs are a bit fuzzy, reddish-brown. Stems on larger individuals will be smooth and somewhat gray. It makes beautiful bright green foliage, each leaf stalked, somewhat elliptical, and finely toothed along the edges.
The leaves are heavily lined with a series of rather parallel, somewhat curving veins, especially when viewed from below. The flowers, which appear in early summer, are small and not too impressive, featuring pale yellow petals. The real show begins when the fruits develop.
The fruits start out as hard, little one-seeded ovaries. While young, they become a bright pink, and this color deepens as the summer goes on, thus getting redder. In the autumn, these fruits have become swollen and somewhat juicy, covered by a lustrous, black skin.
Some people say they are edible, but I’ve never tried them. Each fruit is thus put together something like a cherry, and so we say the fruit type is technically a “drupe.”
This plant is a native species, occurring on upland habitats from Virginia to Missouri, south to eastern Texas and north Florida. It likes to grow on soils featuring a lot of chalk or limestone, but it is not restricted to these.
It’s not too common along the coast, but is occasionally seen growing as a component of ancient shell “middens.”
Whether you want to call it by its common name or scientific name, it’s a really pretty shrub with those attractive leaves and fruits. I don’t know why it isn’t grown in cultivation more frequently.
John Nelson is the curator of the A. C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina, in the Department of Biological Sciences. As a public service, the herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, visit www.herbarium.org, call 803-777-8196 or email nelson@sc.edu.
Answer: “Buckthorn,” Frangula caroliniana