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{{SPlantbox

{{SPlantbox

|common_name= Buffalo berry

|common_name=Buffalo berry

|Temp Metric=°F

|Temp Metric=°F

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|image=shepherdia_argentia_1.jpg

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{{Inc|

{{Inc|

Buffalo berry (Síiephérdia argéntea, Nutt. Lepargyrsea argéntea, Greene). EUeagnacese. Fig. 680. A shrub 6 to 18 feet in hjght, native from Manitoba and Saskatchewan south to Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, now grown in the upper Mississippi Valley and northward for its abundant acid fruits.

Shepherdia (named for John Shepherd, an English botanist). Elaeagnaceae. Shrubs, or small trees with scurfy scales, two of which are in cultivation, one for its striking appearance, the second for its edible fruit.

The buffalo berry was brought into use early, mention being made in Hovey's Magazine of Horticulture for 1841, page 251, of its being frequently cultivated. It is a handsome ornamental shrub, with silvery foliage and red berries. Occasional plants are found with yellow fruit. The plant is dioecious; therefore, care should be taken, if fruit is desired, to plant both staminate and pistillate plants. Western nurserymen are beginning to offer these two kinds of plants separately in the ratio of one staminate to four pistillate plants, but the best proportion is not yet known. Many persona who plant the buffalo berry are disappointed ?? securing only one sex. The staminate or male plants may be known in their winter condition by the dense clusters of rounded flower-buds; the pistillate or female plants by the smaller, flattened, fewer, more slender flower- buds.

Leaves opposite, petiolate, oblong and entire: fls. small, dioecious, in very short spikes or racemes, opposite to small bracts along the rachis, male spikes many-fld., female 2-fld. in the axils of lvs. or often sessile at leafless nodes; calyx of male fls. 4-parted, of female fls. urn-shaped, 4-cleft; stamens in male fl. 8, alternating with 8 lobes of a thick disk; ovary becoming a nut or achene and invested by the fleshy calyx, forming a drupe-like fr.—Three species, N. Amer. The genus Shepherdia was founded by Nuttall in 1818. Rafinesque's Lepargyraea, 1817, is equivalent, and the species have been placed under this name; it is not accepted under the International Rules. In S. argentea, the buffalo berry, the fr. is edible when made into jellies and conserves, and is much prized in the upper plains region for household uses.

The fruit varies greatly in size, quality and season, and is gathered in large quantities for culinary use. It makes a delicious jelly. Some berries are of sprightly flavor, good for eating out of hand. They can also be dried for winter use. The fruit is generally considered better when touched by frost, lees sugar being required. The name is said to have come from the custom of eating the berries as a sauce with buffalo meat in the early days. The buffalo berry makes a fine thorny hedge, that is both useful and ornamental.

The shepherdias are hardy plants, withstanding extremes of cold and drought. They are of easy culture, and grow readily from stratified seeds. For ornamental planting, they are prized for bold positions in front of shrubbery masses, where their gray or white colors afford excellent contrasts. S. canadensis is particularly well adapted for planting on dry rocky sterile banks, where most bushes find great difficulty in securing a foothold. S. argentea succeeds better in the upper Mississippi Valley than in the eastern states. Staminate and pistillate plants of it have different forms of buds.

It is found that sprouts received as dug up in the native thickets from various parts of the Northwest do not always transplant satisfactorily; a year in a nursery row gives them better roots and secures an even stand when set in their permanent place. Seedlings are better rooted. Seedlings are easily raised from seed washed free from the pulp in the fall and stratified for winter, keeping in sand in a box buried just beneath the surface in a well-drained spot in the garden. There should be holes in the box for free drainage and the planting should be done very early in the spring. In Bulletin No. 88, June, 1904, of the South Dakota Experiment Station, Plate 19 shows a field of 7,500 buffalo berry plants of the first generation under cultivation. These plants were raised from seed gathered along the Missouri River of South Dakota, where buffalo berries are especially abundant. However, under cultivation the plant does not respond, as regards early bearing, as quickly as its near relative the Siberian sandthorn (Hip- pophae rhamnoides). It was found that the buffalo berries can be worked on the Russian form of oleaster (Elxagnus angustifolia). The fault of the buffalo berry is its small-sized fruit and the difficulty of gathering it, owing to its numerous thorns, but it has been and is an abundant source of pleasant fruit to thousands of settlers in the newer regions of the West. The fruit varies greatly in size and degree of acidity, affording opportunity for selection work in its native home along the Missouri River and tributaries.

S. rotundifolia, Parry, from Utah, is a silvery tomentose and scurfy evergreen bush: lvs. round-oval or ovate, mostly somewhat cordate, short-petioled: fls. stalked in the axils of the lvs., the staminate mostly in 3's and the pistillate solitary: fr. globular, scurfy, ripening in July.  

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