Plant Highlight · Sparkleberry · The Southeast

The Blueberry That Grew Into a Tree

Sparkleberry took the blueberry blueprint, added a trunk, cinnamon bark, and a taste for dry limestone, and became the one Vaccinium that behaves like a small ornamental tree.

8 min read · By Fiona von Grey · Aiken, South Carolina

Vaccinium arboreum, the sparkleberry, is the plant that breaks the family rules. Say blueberry and most gardeners picture a knee-high to waist-high shrub, acid-loving and fussy about the ground, sweet-fruited and soft-wooded. Sparkleberry keeps the flowers and the general shape of the leaf, then does almost everything else differently. The plant climbs to the height of a small tree, hardens into a crooked, sculptural trunk, sheds cinnamon bark like a crape myrtle, tolerates dry alkaline soils that would kill a highbush blueberry outright, and grows wood dense enough to have earned a reputation among woodworkers. The species epithet, arboreum, says the essential thing before you have seen the plant: this is the blueberry that became a tree.

For the wider clan that sparkleberry belongs to, our field guide to the wild blueberries of the South lays out the whole southern Vaccinium tribe. This highlight zooms in on the outlier, the one member of that tribe you would plant for the bark and the branches as much as for the fruit.

I.The giant of a low-growing clan

Sparkleberry is native across the southeastern and south-central United States, at home on dry sandy uplands, rocky bluffs, old-field edges, and open pinewoods from Virginia to Florida and west into Texas. In that dry, poor ground the plant reaches the size of a large shrub or small tree, commonly ten to twenty feet and occasionally taller, growing slowly into a picturesque, open, irregularly branched form with a short crooked trunk and a light, twiggy crown. The silhouette is the first argument for the plant: where a highbush blueberry makes a rounded mound, sparkleberry makes a small tree with architecture, a thing you can limb up, look through, and site as a specimen.

The common names alone tell you the plant has been noticed for a long time. Sparkleberry and tree sparkleberry describe the glinting fruit and the arboreal habit; farkleberry, the old country name, is the one people remember once they have heard it; winter huckleberry points to the fruit that hangs on past the leaves.

II.Bark and leaf: the four-season case

Two features carry sparkleberry through the year, and neither is the fruit. The first is the bark. On an older trunk the outer bark exfoliates in thin flakes to reveal a patchwork of gray, warm brown, orange, and reddish-brown beneath, a mottled, muscular surface that reads best in winter when the leaves have thinned and the low sun rakes across the trunk. The effect is close to a native crape myrtle, and a limbed-up sparkleberry set where you pass in winter earns the placement on bark alone.

The second feature is the foliage. The leaves are small, leathery, and glossy, a dark lustrous green that holds a shine through the growing season and turns brilliant red to crimson in fall, often among the last plants in the garden to color and to drop. In the Deep South the plant behaves as semi-evergreen, keeping much of that glossy foliage through a mild winter and shedding only as the new growth pushes in spring; farther north the leaves fall after the autumn display. The glossiness is not incidental; the sparkle in the name lives as much in the polished leaf catching light as in the fruit.

III.Flowers, fruit, and the animals they feed

In late spring the whole crown fills with the small white bell-shaped flowers unmistakable as blueberry kin, hundreds of nodding urns held along the wiry branches. Bees work them hard. Sparkleberry is a well-regarded honey plant, and the flowers draw not only honeybees and bumblebees but a suite of the specialist native bees that key on Vaccinium, the southeastern blueberry bee and several mining bees among them. A sparkleberry in full flower is one of the busier plants in a spring garden.

The fruit that follows is where sparkleberry parts company with the grocery blueberry. The small round berries ripen shiny and black and stay hard and dry, more seed than pulp, mealy and astringent rather than sweet. A person will taste one and set the rest aside. Birds and small mammals feel differently, and because the fruit persists on the branches well into winter, the plant becomes a reliable cold-season larder for wildlife long after softer fruit is gone.

IV.The maverick that grows where blueberries cannot

Here is the trait that makes sparkleberry genuinely useful rather than merely handsome. Almost every other Vaccinium demands acid soil and sulks or dies as the pH climbs toward neutral. Sparkleberry tolerates a far wider range, holding on into neutral and even mildly alkaline ground, and thrives on the dry, rocky, sandy, and clay soils that defeat the rest of the genus. The plant grows on limestone. For a gardener on the heavy clay or the sweet soil so common across the Piedmont and the limestone belts of the South, sparkleberry is often the one blueberry relative that will simply grow.

Drought tolerance comes with the territory. Once established on that dry upland ground, sparkleberry carries through a Southern summer without fuss, which is not a sentence you can write about most of the clan. The combination, tolerance of high pH and tolerance of drought, is what earns the plant a place in tough, low-water plantings where a conventional blueberry would be a slow failure.

The wood deserves a closing note in the plant's own defense. Sparkleberry grows some of the hardest, densest wood in the genus, hard enough that the timber earned a reputation for turning tool handles and small implements where larger trees were scarce. A slow-grown plant with dense wood is also a plant that stands up to weather and time, part of why an old sparkleberry can look so gnarled and enduring.

V.Siting sparkleberry in the garden

Design for what the plant does best: an all-season small specimen for dry, sunny, difficult ground. Give sparkleberry full sun to light shade; sun brings the heaviest flowering, the best fall color, and the densest crown, while a little shade suits a woodland-edge planting. Limb up a young plant over a few seasons to reveal the exfoliating bark and the branching, and site the plant where winter light and a winter walk will find the trunk.

For companions, hold to the acid-woodland-edge community the plant grows among in the wild while trusting sparkleberry to bridge into drier, sweeter ground the others avoid. Mountain laurel and native azalea make natural neighbors on the shadier side; on the open, dry side, underplant with little bluestem, aromatic aster, and the low evergreen groundcover blueberries for a family echo at ground level. The ericaceous companions in our guide to the mountain laurels pair especially well.

Sparkleberry rewards the gardener willing to look past the fruit. Plant the species for the architecture of the trunk, the shine of the leaf, the late crimson, and the winter bark, and treat the blueberry lineage as the family joke rather than the point. On the dry, sweet, difficult ground where so little else in this family will grow, that trade is one of the best a Southern garden can make. Sparkleberry is close kin to the deerberry and Elliott's blueberry, other wild southern Vaccinium worth knowing, each with a different gift.

References

North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox, Vaccinium arboreum. · Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Vaccinium arboreum (Farkleberry). · Gardenia, Vaccinium arboreum (Sparkleberry). · United States Department of Agriculture, range and soil data for Vaccinium arboreum.