Vaccinium elliottii

Elliott's blueberry is one of the finest of the wild Southern blueberries, a tall, multi-stemmed deciduous native reaching up to ten feet, with slender twigs and small, glossy green leaves. The species honors Stephen Elliott, the early nineteenth-century South Carolina botanist whose Sketch of the Botany of South Carolina and Georgia remains a landmark of Southern natural history. The old country name mayberry nods to the fruit, which ripens early, sometimes as soon as May in the warm South.

The great garden gift is the autumn. Small, fine-textured leaves that read glossy green through summer turn brilliant scarlet in fall and hang late into winter, giving Elliott's blueberry the strongest fall color of the group and a real place in a border for the show alone.

Early spring brings clouds of small, white to pale-pink, bell-shaped flowers, mildly fragrant and busy with the first bees, followed by small, sweet, dark blue to black berries. The fruit is good fresh or cooked and feeds birds and other wildlife, and while the crop is modest beside a cultivated blueberry, the flavor is fine and the ecological value real.

In the wild, Elliott's blueberry grows across the Southeast in mixed hardwood forests, swampy woodlands, floodplains, and longleaf pine ridges, from southeastern Virginia to Florida and west to Texas. Give the plant full to partial sun and acid, well-drained soil, and use the shrub at a woodland edge, in a native planting, or in a mixed border where the spring bloom, sweet fruit, and scarlet fall color each take a turn. Rarely offered in the trade, and worth seeking out.