Sugar Berry

Alright, today on Treetalk we are discussing Teltis Levigata southern hackberry or a sugarberry. Called sugarberry because these fruits that you see here, these little orange guys, are edible and they're very sweet. They do taste nice but they're a droop, meaning they have a pit, a very hard kind of stone in the middle that encases the seed and then the flesh is around that. But then there's droops So not wildly pleasant to eat but they do taste good. So there we go, the sugarberry. So that's very distinctive here. They're held on individual stalks there as you can see. The leaves. So I live in Pennsylvania as you probably have gathered if you've watched Treetalk before. I do not see southern hackberry much. This is something I remember from my college dendrology classes. I went to North Carolina State University, Go Wolf Pack in Raleigh, North Carolina. So we did have this there. The leaf, it kind of looks Also the margin is smooth. On very young trees, on seedlings, it's more serrated. There's a little bit more serrations but then it's a very smooth margin once it gets larger. Additionally, while we're looking at the leaves, hackberry leaves are very sandpapery often. These are pretty smooth. They can be slightly sandpapery on top but they're very smooth on the bottom. And these ones here, I'm not feeling any of that sandpapery that I was kind of expecting to feel a little bit of. So we've got a couple of them here all growing in together. They're sort of medi They don't get as tall or as much of a canopy tree as Northern Hackberry does. But they do get pretty big and they are ex-current They want to grow out and really soak up the sun. They're not as shade tolerant as our Northern Hackberry is either. But they are pretty tolerant of shade. Let's take a quick look at the bark because in addition to the leaves being very different than our Northern Hackberry, the bark is a little different too. So let's take a quick look at that. So with our Northern Hackberry, we have tons of warts. It's that, To me it looks Southern Hackberry or Sugarberry is mostly smooth but it has some of those little warty quirky projections on it. So it kind of looks So pretty interesting. I have noticed, so I haven't encountered this tree as much as I've encountered Northern Hackberry, but it mostly is growing in kind of swampy, wet flood plain kind of conditions is where I've seen it in a while. And I very rarely see it have really good form where it's kind of going straight up and then ex-current out. It usually is kind of really branchy, a little bit lower, smaller. So that is going to impact its uses of course, of how good the quality is for different applications for the wood. I think it kind of seam bends pretty well. Ecologically, excellent for pollinators, excellent for our songbirds. A lot of wildlife are eating those fruits, not just people And it is a pretty fast growing tree in those bottom land environments, so really valuable for restoration too. So there you have it, Sugarberry. What a fun one to b So it is, yeah, it's more of a kind of southeast and coastal plain species. And then kind of through the deep South too, all the way over to central Texas or so. Pretty common down here. And really cool to see. I really do love the bark. It really stands out to me.