Symplocos paniculata Seeds | Sapphire Berry
LATIN NAME: Symplocos paniculata
COMMON NAME: Sapphire Berry
Plant Profile
Symplocos paniculata is a deciduous shrub or small tree of the sapphire berry family, three to eight metres tall, with ovate leaves and panicles of small white flowers in late spring that are strongly fragrant. The fruit is a small drupe of an intense, almost metallic blue, ripe in autumn and held on the bush after the leaves fall.
It grows in thickets and forest edges from the Himalaya through China to Japan, and it is planted in gardens for the blue fruit and for the scent of the flowers. The blue colour is unusual in temperate fruits, and it comes from a pigment bound in the skin rather than from anthocyanin alone.
Science & Biotechnology
The genus is known in Japan for its use in dyeing: the leaves of several Symplocos species contain aluminium-accumulating compounds and are dried and powdered as a mordant, sold as tsuyu, which fixes colours on silk. The same chemistry makes the plant an aluminium accumulator, unusual among woody plants.
The blue fruit is eaten by birds, particularly thrushes, which strip a bush within days of ripening. The seed inside is hard and the flesh is thin and dry, so the fruit is ornamental rather than culinary, and the colour fades once picked. The fruit is also used to dye cloth a grey-blue in some districts, though the colour is weak and fades in sunlight.
Uses & Benefits
The shrub is grown for ornament: the spring scent, the autumn blue fruit and the yellow autumn leaf. The leaf is harvested in Japan for the dye trade, and the wood is used for small implements and for fuel.
The fruit is not eaten by people, and the bark and leaf appear in local medicine rather than in any pharmacopoeia. In a garden the plant is best used at the edge of woodland, where the fruit can be seen against a dark background and the birds can reach it. The wood is also used for small domestic objects in Japan, where the species is planted around shrines.
Growing from Seed
Seed has a hard coat and a dormant embryo. Stratify for three months at 2 to 5°C, then sow at 15 to 20°C, and expect germination in spring, sometimes in the second year. Cuttings of softwood in early summer root under mist.
Plants want acid soil, sun or part shade and moisture, and they tolerate clay better than most woodland shrubs. They are best planted small, since they resent root disturbance. Prune after flowering if shape needs control, and leave the fruit on the bush for the birds if the garden can spare it. The fruit holds on the branch into winter, which is when the colour is most visible against bare stems.
Our Take
A shrub for the back of a woodland border, grown for a blue that no other hardy fruit quite matches and for a spring scent that carries across a garden.
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