Hello Everyone,
This special post is intended for any would be seed collectors out there. I was recently contacted by a seed company that is looking for someone to collect maleberry (Lyonia ligustrina) seeds. Their regular collector is no longer available and they are running low on seed. If you would be interested in doing this, please contact me through the “Contact Me” tab at the top of this page and I’ll send you the contact information for the seed company. This is a unique opportunity for the right person(s) and I hope this post will generate some interest.
This photo shows what can be large terminal clusters (elongate inflorescences) of maleberry flowers. It also shows the shrub’s leaves, which look very similar to blueberry leaves. In fact, maleberry and blueberry often grow side by side along pond, river, and wetland shores and are essentially the same size. If it wasn’t for the fact that blueberries bloom about two months earlier, if the two shrubs were in bloom side by side, at a glance you’d think they were both blueberries. One noticeable difference between the two is how blueberries will grow on mountains and hilltops and maleberries won’t. At least, in my experience they don’t. They seem to like moist roots because I always find them right along shorelines. I often find them growing near or under red maples along shorelines as well.
If you know what a blueberry blossom looks like you quickly see that, though maleberry blossoms might appear the same at first glance, they are really very different. Whereas blueberry blossoms are relatively long and narrow, maleberry blossoms are short and squat, and only about half the diameter.
Just about the time blueberries are ripe enough for picking, the seed capsules of maleberries begin to form. Each maleberry seed capsule is 1/8 to 5/16 inch in diameter and hard and woody. They ripen from green to brown and when ripe start to split open into 5 segments, as this photo taken in January 2020 shows. They form in July or August here in New Hampshire and mature through summer and fall and finally start to open in January or February of the following year. Seed capsules can be collected through April of the following year but waiting much after that will increase the chances that they will have already released their seeds. I have seen many hundreds of capsules on a single shrub. Even after the seeds are released the dry capsules turn to a grayish color and will stay on the shrub in some form or another year-round, and are helpful for identification. Plants live for about 20 years.
There are certain considerations that a seed collector must think about. Number one is, never take all the seeds. A good rule of thumb is, take one out of every twenty. If you come upon a colony of black eyed Susans for example, you would take one seed head out of every twenty. The same is true for maleberries, you would take one group of 5 or 6 seed heads for every twenty groups. You do not cut all the seed heads from a single plant, ever.
Maleberry flowers grow on the previous year’s stems, which means they should be pruned in late winter or very early spring, which is exactly when the seedpod harvest would take place. You need to know how and when to prune any flowering shrub, and I would guess that this information would be easily found online.
Since I haven’t spoken to the seed company in depth about this all I know is they want the seeds so they can sell them. I don’t know or care who they will sell them to; I’m just doing this post as a favor to both them and the maleberries. Maleberries are at risk in certain places. In Nova Scotia for instance there are only 33 known mature plants, and they are being threatened by off road vehicles and invasive plants. Throughout Canada maleberry is now considered an extremely rare species. In the United States plants grow up and down the east coast from Maine to Florida, and west to eastern Texas and Oklahoma. If you live in any of these places collecting seed would be possible. Does the seed company need more than one collector? This I can’t answer but I can’t see that it would be a problem.
Please save questions like “How much will I be paid?” for the seed company, because I don’t know. I would guess that you would be paid by the volume of seed collected and sent in, as in dollars per ounces or grams.
Since right now is the time to collect maleberry seed, time is of the essence.
If you’d like to peek into the life of a seed collector, you can read an interview done with seed harvest and restoration technician Keith Bennett by the Nature Conservancy here: https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/seed-collector-missouri/
One seed births a thousand forests. ~Matshona Dhliwayo
Thanks for coming by.
New Hampshire Garden Solutions 