Field Notes––

Deck The Halls With Boughs Of…Winterberry

By Dottie Evans

Now is the dark time of year and we need to get out in the light.

––Garrison Keillor

The Winter Solstice fell on Wednesday, December 21, at 1:30 pm, dead center the middle of a week filled with preholiday festivities and preparations. We’re burning our candles at both ends trying to get everything done.

With barely nine hours of daylight and 15 hours of darkness, most of us are running on a deficit of sunshine and vitamin D. We are overstressed and underexercised. Not a good idea, according to our favorite Minnesota humorist.

He warns us not to sink too far into the comfort of couch and home. Rather, we must stir our stumps and get out for a little while into the cold, white light of a winter’s day. Gather in whatever faint warmth the sun affords and breathe deep of the fresh air. We’ll feel better for it, he promises.

This sounds like a northerner’s universal antidote to the winter blahs, and it reminds me of a beloved family story about surviving the dark time that never failed to delight us kids. It concerned my great-grandmother Bridgman, who was of Canadian heritage and who also lived in Minnesota.

It seems she was a great believer in the healing power of sunshine. During the coldest months of the year, she would make her children walk out in the park and on sunny days, they were required to sit on a bench facing the sun with their mouths open for at least 15 minutes. That was to kill the germs and gather in the sun’s healing rays. Whether or not that story was apocryphal we didn’t care. We just loved the image.

Today, there are plenty of reasonable excuses to go through the front door and out into nature. Fill the birdfeeders, walk around the block, sweep or shovel the walk. Head for a nearby field or woods to harvest wild weeds, seeds, and greens to decorate our mantels.

We might cut white pine and hemlock, and there is ivy already trailing from the planter by the porch window. But what about the holly to deck the halls?

In local nurseries or in our gardens, we can find the traditional English kind of holly that has prickly, pointy leaves and small red berries. But there’s a native American holly that we ought to remember called winterberry. Harvesting a sprig or two requires effort. You have to tramp around in the bracken and maybe even get your feet wet.

Winterberry is not evergreen because the leaves fall off in the fall. But its large bright red berries make a brilliant splash of crimson in the muted winter landscape. It grows best along the banks of streams and beside ponds. Once a winterberry bush has reached above-deer-grazing height, it will happily thrive there for years and even decades.

Like most of our native plants, beauty is not its only asset. Early New England colonists quickly learned from the native tribes that winterberry, also called black alder, false alder, inkberry, and fever bush, was a useful tonic and astringent.

In Newtown, we’ve got plenty of winterberry to remind us of bygone days. One handsome specimen arches over The Taunton Press company stone wall along Route 25; there is winterberry in the swampy wetland off Currituck Road; winterberry grows around the duck pond off Deep Brook Road and it fills the woodsy wetland along Route 302.

While looking for winterberry, don’t forget to bring along your shears. Just don’t clip off too much, so the rest of us can enjoy what remains.

This might be the darkest time of year, yet in ways that matter it is the brightest of all. Family and friends gather. We light fires and share food, we hang lights and give gifts. We count our many blessings. We can bring winterberry, the true American holly, into our homes.

If you decide to go outside in search of winterberry, don’t forget to face the sun and open your mouth wide.