| NOVEMBER 18, 2010 -- “Go ahead, they’re good,” said Kim Botelho, holding out a handful of small wild berries colored red and gold. I imagined my throat constricting due to berry poisoning, but dropped them into my mouth, as I attempted an air of casualness, and then crunched down on the small seeds hesitantly.
I’d walked through Danbury’s Bear Mountain Reservation, where Botelho handed me the berries — a species called autumn olives (though they have no relation to actual olives) — dozens of times and never thought about eating them. Like most people, I didn’t even know what autumn olives were.
“They taste like a cross between pomegranate and cranberry,” said Botelho, as she popped a few in her mouth, mimicking her young son who was doing the same a few feet away. Botelho, a member of the Danbury Conservation Commission, has been collecting autumn olives (also called Japanese Silverberry and Oleaster) for three years, since a friend introduced them to her in the same way she introduced them to me. She collects them by the bagful to make sweetly-tart jam to give as gifts. In the past she’s flavored it with citrus rind; this year, she’s using ginger.
The berries look and taste pleasantly exotic, are high in antioxidants and are wildly plentiful. Score, right? Maybe.
Autumn olives grow in forests all over the country from large, hardy bushes bearing sage-green leaves that droop with berries in the fall. But the plant isn’t native to the United States; the Asian transplant was brought here more than a century ago. It’s now on the Connecticut Department of Agriculture’s list of most invasive plants, spreading faster than park commissioners and forest rangers can keep it in check. It’s been banned from new plantings in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
The berry isn’t a nuisance in its native Asia, where natural predators, like the parasitic insect Wooly Adelgid and naturally competitive plants, keep it from growing too big for its branches.
Botelho sees the harm in the autumn olive plants but doesn’t believe in wiping them out completely, as native-forest purists do. The benefits in the high-yield of berries they produce to feed birds and the easy habitat provided for mice, rabbits and certain butterflies are enough argument to her to defend keeping at least some of them in public parks, forests and sanctuaries.
Steve Ricker, director of the Westmoreland Sanctuary in Bedford, N.Y., is planted firmly against the autumn olive. He aims to remove each one of the hardy bushes from his 630-acre preserve and replace them with native species that will perform the same function for birds and small animals. Possible alternatives include winterberry, a native holly and a non-poisonous form of sumac whose bare branches turn bright red in winter.
At Westmoreland, workers have chipped away at the autumn olive population until only a few, edging the park’s driveway, remain. Those too will be gone soon, thanks to avid cutting back and stumps treated with Roundup in more remote locations.
The autumn olives were planted in Bedford in the 1980s as a quick fix to provide food and shelter to animals, a strategy recommended by the wildlife service in earlier decades. They quickly spread beyond what was manageable. When Ricker teaches kids about autumn olives and other invasive species, he calls them “bully plants” that grow too quickly and push out native bushes and berries.
About the phenomenon of people eating autumn olives, he’s never seen a visitor eat the berries at the sanctuary. Most websites that address the autumn olive phenomenon don’t mention that they are edible for any species but birds.
Botelho, however, convinced me that, invasive or not, they are. |
