Minor Trees Part II: Small Trees and Shrubs

Manzanita and toyon, profiled individually at more length, are undoubtedly the two most widespread small trees in Northeast Marin, present in a large chunk of our extant woodland. By my count of local little trees, there are two other plants that regularly cross the border from shrubiness to treeishness: California hazel and blue elderberry. Today I’ll tell you about these two small trees, and while I’m here dealing with woody plants of modest dimensions, I’ll also give a brief glance to three of our most common and notable shrubs: coyote bush, coffeeberry, and huckleberry. As a rule, these three fall firmly short of tree-status (as defined by height and single-trunkedness), but any admirer of local trees should know these smaller cousins at least well enough to smile and nod a friendly hello.

California Hazel, Corylus cornuta

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus”

Aengus was dealing with a slightly different species of hazel (Corylus avellana), but the impression he gives is generally transferable to our California variety: hazel rods have an appropriate fishing-rod springiness, as well as an excellent conductivity for magic and the whisperings of destiny. Add in leaves of incredible fuzziness and you have a plant with a lot of resonance and human attraction, making it no surprise that it joins Laurel and its variants in the limited local selection of “trees that we name girls after.” (“Laurel” is historically associated with the leafy garlands given to Olympic victors, Roman conquerors, and so on; the use of “Hazel” appears to be based on Shakespeare’s innovative use of the word as a shorthand designation for a particular eye color, perhaps also with a nod to lissom and graceful figures. Probably not because some parents really adored those fuzzy leaves, but you never know.)

Hazel is perhaps most easily recognized by its distinctive growth form, usually featuring a sheaf of many thin, outward-arching limbs, rather than a single trunk. Despite their multiplicity, these limbs can extend to well over head height in clean curving lines to give them at least some claim to treeishness. (I should note that my application of the term “treeish,” as differentiating from “shrubby,” is a positive recognition of erect and noble carriage, while fully recognizing that being treeish as compared to a previously entish state is a distinctly negative development.) As mentioned above, another good clue to hazel’s identify is the extreme fuzziness of their leaves: simple and toothed like their relatives the alders, but surpassingly pleasant to rub between one’s fingers.

Hazel is not overly common in Novato, but is an abundant tree in the understory of shady forests throughout Marin. Look for it here at Olompali and especially at Indian Tree, our richest preserve for thicker, darker forests of both broadleaf and coniferous varieties.

Blue Elderberry, Sambucus caerulea

Or Sambucus nigra ssp. cerulea. Or Sambucus mexicana.
(The taxonomists can’t make up their minds.)

Elderberry can sometimes be a respectably mid-sized tree, with a thick woody trunk reaching up to some 20 feet or so, but it is often a merely large shrub and is not abundant in our relatively dry region. Where present, you can identify it by its opposite and pinnately compound leaves, large flat sprays of cream colored flowers, and abundant blue berries in summer. These berries are much loved by birds and wildlife and can also be cooked and eaten by humans; once upon a time it was popular to gather the berries to make jam, pies, or elderberry wine. As long as it wasn’t prepared by Cary Grant’s murderous aunts:

It is most common around creeks and damp areas, but sometimes appears away from obvious surface water. Here in Novato, there are a few trees near creeks at Olompali, Indian Valley, and scattered around upper Novato Creek, with occasional small individuals elsewhere. If you go out to Point Reyes and other foggy coastal forests, you can see abundant understory expanses of red elderberry, a similar small tree that has flowers in more three-dimensional rather than flat-topped sprays, which then produce bright red berries in late summer.

Bonus Shrubs

These species are almost never treeish, with a dense, bushy growth form lacking a clear vertical trunk and generally limited to moderate heights.

Coyote Bush: Coyote bush is probably our single most common shrub, ubiquitous on the edges of meadows, chaparral, and open woodland. Recognize it by its small, usually toothed leaves and small light flowers, with male and hairy-tufted female flowers borne on separate plants. Some people call it coyote brush – same thing.

Coffeeberry: This evergreen shrub of woodland understories and some scrubby habitats is a popular choice for native plant gardening, with large berries attractive to many kinds of wildlife. Large, dark green leaves are somewhat similar in form to toyon, another modest woody plant of local woodlands, but are untoothed, and the plant over all is generally lower and less vertically-oriented than toyon. Green flowers produce berries that ripen to a dark purplish. Not common here, coffeeberry is like many other of our forest plants best found at Indian Tree, where it grows in the relatively dry understory of Douglas-Firs.

Huckleberry: Huckleberries are kind of like blueberries, but wilder and more exciting to find, pick, and taste than any store-bought fruit. There’s a reason that they provide the illustrious eponym for the most free-spirited individual in American literature, the ever undomesticated Huck Finn, and the subject for an entire essay’s worth of Thoreauvian praise (the unfinished “Huckleberries” is somewhat obscure and does not seem to be easily available online, or I would certainly give you a link – look it up in a book!). Nothing cheers Henry up like a day of huckleberrying, something that should be kept in mind by those who think of him as a humorless eco-scold or antisocial grump. Huckleberries are a fountain of good humor:

Dr. Manassah Cutler, one of the earliest New England botanists, speaks of the huckleberry lightly as being merely a fruit which children love to eat with their milk. What ingratitude thus to shield himself behind the children! I should not wonder if it turned out that Dr. Manassah Cutler ate his huckleberry pudding or pie regularly through the season, as many his equals do. I should have pardoned him had he frankly put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and cried ‘What a Great Doctor am I?” But probably he was lead astray by reading English books. . .

Having cataloged the richness of American berries in this essay, Thoreau sums up his simple motivation – the same as that which prompts me to write these catalogs of birds, trees, and shrubs: “I state this to show how contented and thankful we ought to be.” And so may you be as well if you climb to the upper hilltops of Indian Tree Preserve and find a few August berries fresh and alive among the serried ranks of little shiny, pointed leaves. There are many more huckleberries to be found in the moist, foggy forests of West Marin, but personally I find that berries that you have to drive to get to never taste as good. It’s practically like buying berries at that point, and since I’ve just reread that Thoreau essay, any reduction of huckleberrying to the commercial or transactional level feels like a sad shadow of what an ideal huckleberrying excursion should be:

. . . at the same time that we exclude mankind from gathering berries in our field [i.e. through commercialization of traditional berry picking and rigorous enforcement of private property rights], we exclude them from gathering health and happiness and inspiration, and a hundred other far finer and nobler fruits than berries, which are found there, but which we have no notion of gathering and shall not gather ourselves, nor ever carry to market, for there is no market for them, but let them rot on the bushes.

Keep this in mind, and the interesting thing is that you can find that same health and happiness and inspiration in the huckleberry woods even when there are no berries to be found. These fruits are always in season.

Header photo: Hazel (big toothed leaves) and huckleberry (littly shiny leaves) together, I think at Point Reyes somewhere.