Vaccinium stamineum

Deerberry is the odd one out among the wild Southern blueberries, a loose, variable native shrub of dry, sandy uplands, pinewoods, and old-field edges across the eastern and central United States. The flowers give the plant its botanical name: where most blueberries hide their stamens inside closed urns, deerberry opens wide, greenish-white bells with the yellow stamens thrust well beyond the petals, so the species is stamineum, of the stamens. The common name is plainer still, since deer are as fond of the ripe fruit as any creature in the woods.

Less familiar than the highbush and rabbiteye kinds, deerberry earns a place for quiet beauty and toughness, thriving where the soil runs dry, lean, and acid and few other shrubs will linger. The narrow, elliptical leaves range from fresh spring green to a striking glaucous blue-green that stands out like old silver, and in early summer the little bells dangle from slender stalks. The berries that follow are relatively large for a blueberry, ripening from green through pink to dusky purple or brown, edible if somewhat astringent, and valuable above all to birds, deer, and small mammals.

The plants offered here are cutting-grown from a particularly handsome colony found in the sandhills of South Carolina, chosen for glaucous foliage, an elegant structure, and the way the shrub forms naturalistic colonies over time. That silvered leaf is the reason to grow this form, a cool foil among the greens of a native planting.

Give deerberry well-drained, sandy, acid soil in full sun to part shade, and use the shrub for naturalizing, understory restoration, sandhill and pine-ecosystem gardens, and native or wildlife plantings where subtlety is welcome. Pair with other dry-ground natives, allow room for the loose colony to spread, and let the glaucous foliage and generous wildlife value carry the season. Photos courtesy of Eric Hunt and Susan Strine.