Euonymus europaeus Seeds | Spindle

Spindle (Euonymus europaeus) seed — Spindle (*Euonymus europaeus*): Celastraceae (staff-vine family), native to Most of Europe from Ireland and southern Britain east into Russia, and south to the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Caucasus; naturalised in parts of North America.

LATIN NAME: Euonymus europaeus

COMMON NAME: Spindle, European Spindle, Common Spindle

Plant Profile

In late summer the spindle hangs small, hard, rose-pink fruit that look like nothing much until they split. Each capsule then opens along four seams and turns itself inside out, revealing up to four seeds, and every seed sits in a brilliant orange fleshy coat that strikes against the pink husk. The combination of pink and orange in one small fruit is the reason the shrub is planted at all.

The capsule is green and easily overlooked until the first cool nights, when it flushes pink and the seams begin to lift. Collect it once the seams are clearly visible but before the valves curl back, because seed that has hung open on the bush through wet weather is already being taken by birds.

The orange coating is an aril, a fleshy reward for the birds that swallow the seed and pass it out intact somewhere else. For people the same tissue is a purgative of the harshest sort, and the whole plant carries cardiac glycosides; every part should be treated as poisonous, and the bright fruit should never be left within reach of a small child or a grazing animal.

The young stems are green, smooth and noticeably squared in cross-section, with four pale lines or ridges running along them, and the pairing of opposite leaves on those square shoots gives the bush an orderly look in winter when little else is in leaf. The leaves are oval to lance-shaped, finely toothed, glossy and mid-green, turning a rich crimson, rose and orange-red in autumn on a good selection. The flowers are small, four-petalled, greenish-yellow, tucked into loose clusters in late spring, and they are easily missed by anyone not looking for them.

Spindle is the principal food plant of the spindle ermine moth, whose gregarious larvae strip the leaves and spin a dense white silk tent over the shoot tips; a hedgerow plant can look as if it has been wrapped in a sheet by early summer. The damage is ugly but rarely fatal, because the bush pushes a second flush of leaves afterwards. Blackcaps and robins take the fruit, the flowers are visited by flies and small bees, and the plant is a modest but genuine component of the low scrub and woodland edge community.

Science & Biotechnology

The seed is the most toxic part, and the chemistry behind that reputation is a family of cardenolides — steroidal glycosides with an evonoside skeleton and related compounds — which act on the heart muscle in the same way as digitalis and, in quantity, cause vomiting, colic and worse. Pharmaceutical interest in the genus has focused on these compounds as structural models rather than as medicines, and the widely grown American species have their own alkaloid and cardenolide profiles that differ from the European one.

Uses & Benefits

The English name is a trade name. The wood is pale, close-grained, very hard and takes a fine polish, and it was turned into the spindles that gave the plant its name, along with lace bobbins, knitting needles, skewers and toothpicks. Charcoal from the twigs burned hot and clean enough to be used in the manufacture of gunpowder. Growing a hedge in north-western Europe, you could hardly avoid the shrub, and its usefulness kept it in the hedgerow long after the spinning wheel went out of the cottage.

Use it in a mixed native hedge or as a single specimen among grasses, where the autumn fruit and the crimson foliage carry the border through to the end of the season. It tolerates chalk, clay and coastal wind, and it responds well to hard cutting in late winter, which keeps the coloured young wood coming. Plant bare-root stock in the dormant season, water through the first summer, and cut a proportion of the oldest stems to the base in rotation rather than shearing the whole bush every year.

Growing from Seed

Spindle seed is not ready to be sown the moment it is cleaned. It has a fleshy aril, an underdeveloped embryo and two separate restraints on sprouting, one that needs warmth and one that needs cold, so that in nature the seed spends a warm period first and a cold period afterwards before the root emerges. Clean the aril off straight away, sow the seed in a pot of gritty compost, keep the pot moist and shaded through the first summer, leave it outdoors through the winter, and expect the seedlings to appear over a long and uneven period the following spring. Dry storage is the enemy: seed kept in a warm, dry packet very often never comes up at all.

Spindle resents disturbance once it is established, so plant small and plant once. Seedlings transplant well as bare-root stock lifted from a nursery bed while the buds are still closed, and an open, well-drained mix of loam, leaf mould and horticultural grit suits the roots far better than heavy wet clay. Water deeply and infrequently for the first season, mulch with composted bark, and keep grass and bindweed away from the stem.

Our Take

Buy seed, not plants, if you want the fun of it — the fruit is collected early and the seedlings are easy enough provided the seed is never allowed to dry. For other members of the family worth a place in a small garden, see our notes on winged spindle, which has the best autumn fire, and eastern wahoo, its North American counterpart. Hamilton spindle carries the same fruit display on a larger bush.

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