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Gaylussacia brachycera
Box huckleberry is a low evergreen shrub of the heath family, related to blueberries, known for leaves like boxwood. It is a rare plant in the wild, and the key to growing it is cool, moist, shaded conditions with acidic soil.
Gaylussacia brachycera, commonly known as box huckleberry or box-leaved whortleberry, is a low North American shrub related to the blueberry and the other huckleberries. It is native to the east-central United States (Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee).
Gaylussacia brachycera is easily distinguished from other members of its genus by its leaves: they resemble those of boxwood (hence its name) and lack the resin glands typical of huckleberries. Like its relatives, it bears white urn-shaped flowers in the early summer, which develop to blue, edible berries in late summer. It is mostly found in Appalachia; many of its stands there were known to natives, who picked and ate the berries, before botanists became aware of them in the 1920s.
About 100 separate stations for box huckleberry have been documented in the scientific literature. By the time of Baird's collection in 1845, the West Virginia stands of the plant had been lost to science, and his Pennsylvania colony was the only one known for some time. Specimens of box huckleberry were subsequently identified in Delaware in 1870, by William M. Canby.
Black huckleberry · Bog Huckleberry · Dwarf huckleberry · Blue huckleberry · Woolly huckleberry · Blue Ridge Huckleberry · Gaylussacia pulchra · Hairytwig huckleberry · Bear huckleberry
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Gaylussacia brachycera by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
