RECOGNIZING GLOSSY BUCKTHORN

GLOSSY, OR EUROPEAN BUCKTHORN...

...MANY PEA-SIZED FRUITS...

...CONTAINING THREE SEEDS

WALNUT TREES ON 6th ST. AND RITTENHOUSE AVE.

Friday, 8:00 AM.  42 degrees F, wind WNW, light with moderate gusts.  The sky is overcast and it rained off and on last night, another .25".  The humidity is 88%. The barometer is mostly steady at 29.86". The Farmers Almanac predicts cold, dry weather for the net few days but it looks like we will get wet cold, weather instead, with perhaps the first snow of the season.  I have brought the plants in from the porch and decks but there's still a lot to be done before winter sets in, and once it dries out I have to mulch leaves and put the gardens to bed.
   The European, or glossy buckthorn is an invasive large shrub to small tree with pea-sized red to black fruit that might be confused with cherry fruit.  The bark also looks much like the bark of a young cherry tree, being smooth, shiny brown in color and with dotted lenticels like cherry bark.
   Now is a good time to recognize Rhamnus frangula, as the leaves stay green and attached to the branches much longer than most native shrubs.  The fruit ripens from red to blue-black, and each berry-like fruit has three, or sometimes four, black seeds that are flat on one side.  The fruit is not really poisonous, but has an acrid taste and if eaten in any quantity will cause gastritis, as its former latin species name, cathartica, testified.  Seedlings and even larger plants can be pretty easily pulled up by hand, or popped out with a shovel.  Just cutting the trunks at ground level only causes them to re-sprout, unless treated with herbicide.  Don't just throw larger bushes with lots of berries in a wood chipper and then use the chips for mulch, as the berries will germinate and spread new seedlings elsewhere.
   Walnut trees, Caryua ovata, with their long, pinnately compound,  golden-yellow leaves and black trunks, are conspicuous now in the landscape, and their yellow-husked nuts can be found lying under the trees.  They are not native much north of central Wisconsin, but there are more in the Bayfield area than one might think, many having been planted in farm yards and elsewhere for their edible nuts, and spread from there by squirrels.