With our nitrogen-poor, acidic, sandy soil, one of the more successful native shrubs on Cape Cod is northern bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica). It is found in habitats ranging from sand dunes, to open forests, to the edges of bogs and marshes, and can tolerate a wide range of moisture. Despite its commonness, for someone new to plant identification, this can be either a very difficult or very easy plant to identify. 

On the difficult end of the scale, when I was first learning our local plants, I encountered a broad-leafed shrub that still had its leaves in mid-January. I thought, “This will be easy. We have so few evergreen broad leaved plants.” I looked through all my guidebooks and couldn’t find anything that was even close. I was stumped! I was so frustrated by what I thought should’ve been an easy question, that I ended up sending photos to a botanist friend of mine for help. He informed me that what I had was a northern bayberry. My guidebooks all listed it as a deciduous shrub. And it often is. But along the coast, during mild winters, I now personally classify this plant as “semi-deciduous”. Sometimes it loses its leaves. Sometimes it doesn’t. I guess northern bayberry doesn’t like to follow the rules. So, I got pretty unlucky on that first encounter.

More often, especially this time of year, northern bayberry is easy to identify by its fruits. The clusters of small round berries start green, and then mature to a dull gray-blue. Their surface appears bumpy, and they are waxy to touch. The berries, as well as the leaves, are also highly aromatic; northern bayberry is the source of popular bayberry candles. To make the candles, the berries are boiled and the melted wax can be extracted when it floats to the top. The book Coastal Plants: from Cape Cod to Cape Canaveral by Stuckey and Gould states that “bayberry candles are considered a luxury because of the effort involved in producing them” continuing on to note that it takes 40 pounds of ripe berries to produce 1 pound of wax! Although historically cradles would be made with pure bayberry wax, today it is more common for small amounts of the wax to be used only for scenting candles and soaps made predominantly from other material. 

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “But Elise, didn’t you notice the berries?” And that would be a great question! But northern bayberry shrubs are dioecious, meaning each plant either produces male or female reproductive structures, but not both. And only female plants can produce berries. So it’s likely that the plant I encountered was a male. Had I crushed up one of the leaves, the scent might have given it away, but I didn’t. A great lesson in using all your senses to gather information! 

Whether you can identify northern bayberry or not, birds are well aware of its presence. The berries are an attractive winter food source for them. Species like the yellow-rumped warbler rely heavily on these fruits in the winter months. Northern bayberry fruits are also an important source of food for bobwhites and tree swallows.