Shepherdia

Plant Characteristics

Habit		shrub
Lifespan:	⌛	perennial

Cultivation

Features:	✓	evergreen, deciduous, edible

Scientific Names

Elaeagnaceae >

Shepherdia >

Nutt. >

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Shepherdia (Buffaloberries) are a genus of small shrubs which have rather bitter tasting berries, native to northern and western North America. The genus has three species:

• Shepherdia argentea - Silver buffaloberry
• Shepherdia canadensis - Canada buffaloberry
• Shepherdia rotundifolia - Round-leaf buffaloberry

Buffaloberries are edible for humans. They are quite sour, and afterwards leave the mouth a little dry. A touch of frost will sweeten the berries. Make jelly, jam, or syrup, or prepare like cranberry sauce from the forefrost berries. The berry is recognizable by being a dark shade of red, with little white dots on them. They are rough to the touch, and found on both trees and shrubs.

Read about Shepherdia in the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture

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. 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 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. 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. CH The above text is from the Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture. It may be out of date, but still contains valuable and interesting information which can be incorporated into the remainder of the article. Click on "Collapse" in the header to hide this text.

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References

• Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, by L. H. Bailey, MacMillan Co., 1963

External links

• w:Shepherdia. Some of the material on this page may be from Wikipedia, under the Creative Commons license.
• Shepherdia QR Code (Size 50, 100, 200, 500)