Bearberry – Arctostaphylos uva-ursi

This low ground cover with a tongue-twisting scientific name, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, is native across the North American continent and in Europe and Asia as well. Not many plants are found over such a wide part of the globe – proof enough that this plant finds many places where it can flourish. It grows on the sandy banks of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, is completely at home in the upper reaches of the Olympic Mountains in Washington, and in many dry sandy places between.

It is an excellent ornamental plant, never growing over a few inches high, but it can prove to be temperamental. This is probably the reason why some people have given up their half-hearted efforts to grow it. However, with proper planting and a little care it makes an excellent slow-spreading evergreen ground cover or trailing plant for the rock garden.

The bearberry has leaves about 1 inch long that turn a beautiful rich bronze in fall and remain this color through the winter. It is ideally suited for growing in dry acid soils, preferably sandy, and is even used by landscape highway engineers in planting some embankments that are too steep to mow. Strangely enough, it does not seem to grow at all well in rich soil.

An ideal situation for it would be one where it can ramble over some natural rock outcrop, especially if partially shaded, for it is frequently found in the woods growing with blueberries and native cranberries in poor rocky or sandy soils.

The fruits, bright-red berries about 1/4 of an inch in diameter, start to color in late summer. The white or pink flowers are too small to be of much ornamental value.

Plantings of bearberry can be established in either one of two ways. Pot-grown nursery plants arc preferred to bare-root collected plants, since the latter invariably die.

A second method, in areas where the plant is native, is to dig up dense mats or sods of it. The new planting site should be excavated to a depth of 3 or 4 inches and filled in with a good peatmoss over which a light layer of sand is placed. The sods are then laid close together on the prepared bed, and sand is washed in to fill the spaces between the sods.

All in all, this is an excellent ground cover, hardy in the coldest parts of the United States, and a distinctive ornamental throughout a great part of the country where acid soil predominates.

by D Wyman

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