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| Photo Credit: © Pennystone Gardens |
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Mitchella repens offers bright red berries among evergreen leaves throughout winter. |
If you’re looking for something wonderful to dress up your holiday table this Christmas season, consider creating a traditional holiday decoration that harkens back to Colonial times: a festive partridgeberry bowl.
You can still find these decorations being sold at holiday church sales from New England all the way down through Appalachia. What are they exactly? They’re bowls filled with a bit of Mitchella repens, or partridgeberry – a native groundcover from eastern US woodlands. This beautiful evergreen has gorgeous, bright red berries about a quarter inch in diameter that last all winter, really spicing up a barren landscape. The plant’s leathery green foliage certainly adds a bit of holiday cheer, as well. And when the foliage dries, it smells of newly mown hay. | Add Photo to Journal |  | | Photo Credit: © Pennystone Gardens | | Harvest a small patch of partridgeberry for a decorative holiday delight. |
In the wild, you’ll find partridgeberry in shady woods, especially under pines and hemlocks or along shady streams near swamps. Some refer to this plant as a small, trailing evergreen shrub, while others say it’s a handsome woody vine with creeping stems. But no matter how the plant’s classified, many agree that it makes an excellent groundcover for shady spots in the home garden. In my own yard, it forms a slowly expanding mat that brightens up difficult spots on my garden’s edges.
I think you’ll find partridgeberry to be one tough cookie: It’s able to withstand winters that reach down to 40 degrees below zero! And hot summers don’t bother it too much either, although the plant seems to prefer cool, shady locations to really thrive.
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