Vaccinium bracteatum

A large evergreen shrub with glossy leaves, reaching six to twelve feet in time and occasionally more, with the leathery, polished foliage that sets the evergreen blueberries apart from their deciduous relatives. New growth flushes bronze to red before hardening to dark green. White urn-shaped flowers hang in short racemes in early summer, each cluster subtended by the leafy bracts that give the species its name, and are followed by small dark berries, edible and mildly sweet. The habit is dense and rounded, useful year-round in a way that a highbush blueberry never manages. Our plants were struck from cuttings taken at the old Woodlanders site, off stock that has been growing here in Aiken for many years.

What makes this plant genuinely remarkable is not in the garden at all. In China, Vaccinium bracteatum is wu fan shu, the black rice tree, and the leaves have been used for at least a thousand years to dye glutinous rice a deep blue-black. The dish is wu mi, black rice, and it is prepared for the Qingming festival and for Buddhist observances, particularly among the Dong people of Guizhou and across the provinces of the southeast. Leaf juice is pounded and steeped, the rice soaked in it, and the resulting grain takes on a color and a faint fragrance that no other plant produces. The chemistry has since become a research subject in its own right, with food scientists studying the pigment as a natural blue colorant and finding, along the way, that rice starch dyed this way digests more slowly than plain rice.

Alongside the food tradition sits a medicinal one. Wu fan shu appears in Chinese pharmacopeias for inflammation, diarrhea, and skin eruptions, and the leaves were regarded as strengthening and anti-fatiguing, which is part of why the black rice was eaten at festivals in the first place. Modern laboratory work on leaf extracts has reported antioxidant, antimicrobial, and hypoglycemic activity, and has isolated a range of flavonoids and iridoids. The research is active and preliminary rather than settled.

In the garden, treat this as you would any evergreen blueberry: acid soil, humus-rich and well-drained but never dry, in sun to part shade. The whole genus is fussy about pH and this species is no exception, so alkaline ground will bring on chlorosis quickly. Growth is unhurried. The glossy evergreen foliage and neat habit make a good informal hedge, a woodland-edge shrub, or a container specimen, and the plant pairs naturally with camellias, Illicium, and evergreen azaleas that want the same acid conditions. Anyone growing an ethnobotanical or dye collection should want this one on the strength of the rice alone.