INVADERS: ASIATIC BITTERSWEET
The Monday Garden, August 22, 2004, Issue 126
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When I was a child in upstate New York, we treasured the American Bittersweet, Celastrus scandens, a rare and beautiful plant on the local endangered list. Today, on the Connecticut shoreline, I pull up a lot of its Asian cousin, the Oriental or Asiatic Bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus.
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The native plant grows 10’ to 20’ vines and spreads slowly. Its natural range is Ontario to Manitoba, south to North Carolina and New Mexico (Zones 3- 8). It has separate male and female plants and is bee-pollinated. Its berries are munched up by chickadees, blue jays and mockingbirds, to name a few. It is late-winter survival food for many species, including squirrels. (“Late-winter survival food” means that they don’t like it a whole lot but will eat it when they have to.) The berries aren’t fatal to humans but shouldn’t be eaten because they are guaranteed to clean out the alimentary system in short, albeit painful, order.
The beautiful but deadly invasive cousin, a native of Eastern Asia, Korea, China, and Japan, was first imported to North America in the 1860’s.