When autumn slowly sheds its delightful colors and it gets more and more gloomy outside, the beauty Callicarp comes to your aid, whose shoots are covered with hundreds of spherical fruits, often forming dense clusters.
Most often, purple balls resemble small candies, howeverthe resemblance to sweets is misleadingand only external, as the fruit containing pits are not edible. Note, the effect of consuming more raw "berries" with a bitter taste is most often acute poisoning! Certainly, the fruit of the American beauty Callicarpa americana is less poisonous. It turns out that in the southern states of the USA a very long tradition has been used to make a tasty jelly called Beautyberry Jelly, which tastes best with peanut butter.
Excellent plant fertilizers, recommended by us:
The beauty is a shrub that sheds leaves for the winter, widely valued for its decorative qualities.Its shiny spherical fruits, most often in various shades of purple, are perfectly visible from afar.In the autumn garden it is difficult to find another plant that is equal in beauty to Kallicarp.
Its cut shoots are durable and also look nice in a bottle.Our most famous and appreciated is 'Profusion', a type of beauty Bodiniera Callicarpa bodinieri, selected in the Netherlands at the end of the 19th century century. Viable and strong, the shrub grows to a height of two to three meters and bears exceptionally large amounts of fruit.
Beauty doesn't have big cultivation requirements. Likes sunny to slightly shaded positions with fertile, humus and permeable soil, but not drying out, with neutral or slightly acidic pH.Choose a sheltered place for the shrub as it does not tolerate cold winds.
A young plant should be covered with a thick layer of leaf, straw or compost mulch during the first few winters to protect shallow roots from freezing. Even after severe frosts, the beauty can amaze you with her vigor in the spring.
Bushes decorating autumn
New shoots will be stronger and he althy if we cut sick and frozen sections of older ones to a he althy wood.However, basically the secateurs are a dangerous tool for the beauty.If you handle it carelessly, you can easily deprive the plant of flowers and beautiful fruit.
Remember that most species and varieties of shrubs develop flower buds and bear fruit on older shoots. The exception is the variety of the purple beauty 'Issai' (see box below). Experienced gardeners advise planting several shrubs side by side. A plant pollinated with foreign pollen fruits reliably and abundantly.
