A Field Guide to Blueberry Weeds

(a wild wood lily from last summer)

Since we moved to Maine I’ve written lot about the blueberry barrens, the somewhat wild yet highly managed habitat in which lowbush blueberries are grown. That’s partly because they’re right here: Past the trees that grow on three sides of a property are vast stretches of barrens that are commercially managed and harvested. But I also keep coming back to the barrens because they’re so unique among American agriculture landscapes in that they are a native habitat that’s coaxed into something more resembling a monoculture. But whereas a cornfield in modern American agriculture decidedly does not play host to other plant species—or if it does, those plants are noxious, herbicide-resistant weeds—blueberry barrens are home to a variety of wild plants. Growing alongside the crop are clumps of juniper and huckleberries, spreading colonies of bunchberry—a low-growing miniature dogwood—and snarls of blackberries. There’s even a type of orchid that sometimes grow in the low, boggy spots that pock the rolling, stony fields, though I have yet to see one. But my favorite of all is the huge, fire-colored blossom of the wood lily, which opens around the same time as the tiny wild berries begin to ripen.

Whoever built this house scraped away the barren, and likely hauled in a lot of top soil to spread around before laying down sod. The legacy of the poor soil, which is low in nutrients and high in acidity (aka: not friendly to a lot of plants) is still rather unfortunately apparent in the garden beds, which need a lot of help in terms of fertility. But when we moved in there was one corner of the lot, right by the beginning of the driveway, where nothing was really growing—and this on a beautifully landscaped property. When I first dug up a bit of the dirt over there, it was easy to see why: it’s all gravel, sand, and rocks, aka glacial till, just like the dirt below the huge mats of berry plants out in the barren. Whatever had been done to the rest of property hadn’t been done here, and it has remained, well, barren. So I’ve been working to rewild it, so to speak, planting lowbush blueberries in the small patch along with other native plants that happily grow alongside them.

Aside from walking the barrens, one of the most useful resources I have found for gardening on this specific plot was by no means intended as such. Designed for blueberry growers, the University of Maine Cooperative Extension’s weed identification tool is a guide to removing plants from commercial barrens. But thanks to its rich photo illustrations of the beautiful native plants that grow in blueberry fields (albeit along with some nasty invasive weeds), it’s been a very helpful guide for figuring out what to put in my own little backyard barren.

The corner and I had the same idea, apparently, so for a few plants—wild strawberries, northern bush honeysuckle, cinquefoil, various types of asters and goldenrod, yarrow—all I had to do was move some things around. In some instances, that meant pulling weeds to give native plants space; in others, moving a clump of a wild plant growing right up in the middle of the lawn or in another garden bed over into my burgeoning little meadow. I remain spoiled by the Theodore Payne Foundation in L.A., with its encyclopedic stock of California native plants. But there are some nurseries that sell New England natives around here (sometimes for ridiculous prices), and I’ve bought wild columbine and wild rose plants for the meadow, and have grown other flowers from both purchased and gathered seed.

What the weed guide (and the IRL barrens) will be most helpful with this spring is adding in some more “woody weeds,” like huckleberry bushes and sweet fern (not an actual fern) that can be grown from cuttings. Many Maine wildflowers are quite small, and are slow-growing too, so establishing a clump of sweet fern, for example, could help to fill in some of the empty spots in the meadow. And like any good field guide, I can used weed ID tool to find out the name of any unfamiliar bloom, or to familiarize myself with a plant that I have yet to find out in the barrens and would very much like for the garden. Top on that list is lingonberry, which as a circumboreal plant (my fav botany term I've learned since moving here, which is used to describe plants that are distributed all the way around the top of the globe) is just as at home here as it is in Scandinavia. There’s also a plant that’s called cranberry that’s not actually a cranberry-cranberry, but has red fruit that can be eaten like cranberries, and I would like to have one.

It’s been a late spring here, and with the cold, wet weather I’ve been slow to get all of the post-winter yard cleanup done. But the other day I finally peeled back the layer of fall leaves that were still scattered over the meadow, and was able to see everything resprouting and newly spreading out. The bee balm, which I planted from seed last year, is already starting to run wild with new rhizomes, reminding me of the fact that it’s in the mint family. The blueberries too are beginning to form mats, sending out new stems from the small clumps I planted a little over a year ago. I hope too that the harebells and columbine and blue-eyed grass and milkweed that set seeds last winter will result in new sprouts. It doesn’t look like much now, and it might not even be all that impressive as summer arrives and things start to bloom. There are no riotous annual wildflowers to fill in the blank spaces provide some faster gratification, which is a distinct disadvantage to growing native plants in Maine compared to a place like California. But what I see in all of the new green leaves and swelling buds is progress—and that’s exciting enough for now.