The Urban Pantheist

Common barberry Berberis vulgaris

When we moved to The Dedham House we walked around the big back yard marveling at the many shrubs and perennial plants put there by previous owners. We moved in winter, so the deciduous plants were especially mysterious. One big bush was quite thorny, and threatened to sprawl across more of the yard than we wanted. It seemed simple enough to throw on some work gloves and chop it back to manageable size. This turned out to be much less fun than I anticipated, with lots of thin pointy bits all over the place, and more than a few jabs to my skin.

I did learn in so doing, that the interior of the plant was lurid yellow, and didn't smell great. Later, when I tried to use some of the larger cut branches for firewood, I found that the smell got much much worse. And even later, when the spring leaves came out, the shrub basically returned to it's original size, except maybe taller. It didn't bloom last year, but this year produced the dangling flowers above. Seeing the same flowers across the street made me realize that this was a Barberry shrub.

I won't bore you further with how I determined that it was common barberry and not the more commonly seen (ironic, no?) Japanese barberry. Suffice it to say the way the flowers hang, the number of thorns per cluster, and the edges of the leaves all finally fit, after some agonizing over irregularities. (Okay, fine--the older stems had thorns appearing singly, which is how Japanese barberry is supposed to be, while the new growth has thorns in groups of three, indicating the other species). Also complicating the issue, and I still haven't totally ruled it out, is the fact that there is a known hybrid of the two species out there.

What I do know is that this thing's days are numbered. Both species are invasive, and this particular individual annoys me. How to rip it out is another problem we have yet to solve. If we drag our feet until the fall, red edible berries will appear where the flowers are. While some would admonish us to eat our invasives, in the case of barberry, the birds will also eat the berries, and further the spread of this unwanted plant.