Serviceberries - Edible Landscapes

Serviceberry Blossom April 16

Last fall we had the front of our house landscaped with plants all native to our region.  There are several reasons I chose to stick with native plants - basically they enhance the environment by providing food/shelter to animals, particularly pollinators, using less water, not requiring fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides.  Indiana Wildlife Federation and Indiana Native Plants and Wildflower Society are great sources for using native plants in landscaping for people in Indiana.

Our yard is dominated by many large, old oak trees, so the landscaper we worked with wanted to keep with that theme and create type of woodland edge-habitat with the design.  You will learn in any Ecology 101 course that edge-habitats are where the action takes place.  Because they occur at the boundary between two habitats and provide a variety of heights in vegetation they support a high level of biodiversity.  This is something that is easy to replicate in a yard when landscaping, but is often over-looked in favor of clean lines and highly manicured garden bed edges.

One of the small trees planted in our new landscape is a Serviceberry. These trees were the first to bloom this spring and were absolutely beautiful - but fleeting.  The blooms last

ed less than a week before beginning to leaf out.  I'm told the leaves will turn a lovely red color in the fall.

Yet, what I'm most excited about is that this native plant is also an edible!  Known to some people as a "Juneberry," it will produce blueberry-like fruit in June.  I can already see the girls out picking and eating the berries straight off the trees.  Outside of our vegetable garden, my goal is to incorporate more edible plants into our landscaping.  This type of "edible landscaping" is easy to maintain (especially if they are perennials like berries, rhubarb, or asparagus), provides healthy food for our family, is aesthetically pleasing, and is good for the environment.  This ideology - termed permaculture, was first defined by Bill Mollison as"conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems"

Service berries are also a great source of pollen for bees in the spring and we will definitely be competing with the birds for the berries in June.  I will give an update next month on whether the berries passed the girls' taste-test.

(**Side-note: It was difficult to find an landscaper in Fort Wayne who had any expertise with native plants.  Luckily, I found Laura Stine Gardens and she is both extremely knowledgeable and her crew was wonderful to work with.  She was the first person (and I talked to several landscapers) who understood my vision of wanting to build an habitat, not just throw in a bunch of knock-out roses and call it a day.) 

More about my disdain for roses and gardening with native plants from 5 years ago...