There’s something odd about snowberries. Is it their whiteness? Their weird spongy texture? Snowberries are just plain odd-looking: plump and waxy with a brown stain ontopfrom the leftover flower base (described as a ‘nipple’ in some plant guides). Landscapers like this easily-grown native shrub, although it’s invasive and can form thickets. Its decorative white berries ripen in early fall, side by side with the last of the summer’s small pink flowers. Then the berries (or “drupes,” the term for fleshy fruits with pits, like cherries) remain on the leafless, twiggy plant for most of the winter. The rest of the year, Snowberry is a pretty non-descript shrub. Gardeners are on the lookout for plants that provide winter interest after flowers and leaves are gone, and new cultivars are being developed that are less invasive. Aboriginal peoples had second thoughts about snowberry. Some Canadian tribes called them “corpse” berries, focusing on the ghostly aspect of the white drupes. They regarded the berries as food for people in the Land of the Dead. Other groups used snowberry as medicine, but with caution: a little might cure an upset stomach, too much could cause diarrhea and vomiting. The remedy for this was to eat large quantities of lard, or grease. Snowberry poultice was used to soothe sore eyes.

Plant guidebooks usually mention that snowberry is toxic to humans but edible for birds and mammals. The snowberry bushes in Berman Park are bearing lovely clumps of berries this winter, but during the Big Freeze last month, none were eaten. Now, they are brown and squishy, and smell like an apple that got left out in the car in very cold weather. As winter progresses, birds might get less choosey and take an interest in berries still available in late winter, such as snowberry or mountain ash. (Or, maybe city birds are so well-fed at feeders that they don’t pay much attention to wild foods). Web loggers, source of unexpected and untested “information,” include people who have actually tasted snowberries and lived to tell about it. One person stated that snowberries taste like “bitter Ivory soap." From all the mention of snowberry’s poisonous consequences, tasting is not advised! Thomas Jefferson was crazy about snowberry. He grew it in his Monticello garden from seeds Lewis and Clark brought from Idaho. He declared that snowberry has “some of the most beautiful berries I have ever seen. ” Lewis, the explorer-botanist, wrote a pretty bland description of the white berries while he was catching up on his journal at Fort Clatsop during the cold, rainy winter of 1805/1806: “a globular berry as large as a garden pea and as white as wax” and inside is “a soft white musilagenous [Lewis’s spelling] substance.” Snowberry is called Symphoricarpos albus and there are two varieties native to North America. Western plants are called variety laevigatus and eastern plants are variety albus. Snowberry is widespread in the west, but considered endangered in some eastern states. The plants that were brought to England in 1817, as cover for game birds, were the western variety; our snowberry is now naturalized in Britain.