Pyracantha sp. "Yellow Berried"

The berries are the whole argument. Where most firethorns load their branches with orange and scarlet, this clone ripens to a clean clear yellow, abundant and unusually persistent, holding well after the red-fruited kinds have been picked over by birds. The foliage is relatively small, glossy, and evergreen, which gives the shrub a tidier and far less coarse look than the genus normally manages. Flat clusters of small white flowers cover the branches in late spring and are worked hard by bees. The thorns are entirely real and should be respected.

Pyracantha is Greek and completely literal: pyr, fire, and akantha, thorn. The fire is the fruit, the thorn is exactly what it sounds like. The genus belongs to Rosaceae, close cousin to hawthorn and cotoneaster, and ranges wild from southeastern Europe across into Asia, with most garden material of Asian origin. Yellow-fruited firethorns are a small minority in cultivation, 'Soleil d'Or' being the best known among them, and a clear yellow berry carries one incidental advantage: scab, when it appears, does not leave the sooty discoloration on yellow fruit that so disfigures a red-berried plant.

We originally propagated this clone from a cultivated plant at Williamsburg, Virginia. Our assumption has always been that the shrub is a named variety that lost its label somewhere along the way, but we have never met with it elsewhere and cannot honestly put a name to it, so the plant goes out as it came in. On the group as a whole, Hillier's Manual of Trees and Shrubs, rarely an effusive book, is unusually warm: "All are hardy, and include some of the best evergreen flowering and fruiting shrubs for north and east walls. They are tolerant of all exposures and pollution and all kinds of fertile soil." That judgment has held up for the better part of a century.

Best used as an espalier against a wall or trained on a support, which is where firethorns have always done their finest work, and a north or east wall is not a compromise here but the traditional and best position. Grown free-standing, expect a dense thorny mound of five to eight feet, useful as a barrier hedge and as first-rate nesting cover for small birds. Full sun to part shade, any reasonably fertile soil with drainage, and very little attention once established. Prune after flowering, or in late winter if you would rather see the berries through the cold months; either way remember that fruit comes on older wood, so shearing the whole shrub every year removes the reason you planted it. Watch for fire blight in a humid spring and cut affected shoots well below the damage.