This week’s plant feature is the Maple-leaf Viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium). The Maple-leaf Viburnum or Dockmackie, is found across eastern North America, ranging from Quebec to Texas. In the Piedmont, the Maple-leaf Viburnum is a small shade-tolerant shrub, found in bottomland and upland forests. This shrub typically grows in forests that have been growing for at least 60 years following agricultural abandonment
In April, you can see the Maple-leaf Viburnum’s creamy, white flat-topped cymes of tiny flowers. These flowers are visited by bees, insects, and butterflies. The Maple-leaf Viburnum may also be a host plant for the Spring Azure butterfly, whose caterpillars nibble on the maple-shaped leaves. By the fall, the flowers tranforms into inky black fruit, which are eaten by squirrels and gamebirds, including grouse and turkeys.
Maple-leaf Viburnums, like their congeners, also provide fruit for frugivorous songbirds. Mockingbirds, Catbirds, American Robins, and Cedar Waxwings will all eat the low-fat, low-sugar drupes of Viburnum when times get tough in fall and in winter, after having eaten all the high quality, high-lipid fall fruits available, like those from Sassafras or native buckthorns. While box turtles will eat the fruits of a number of our native shrubs, including blueberries and blackberries, they tend not to eat Maple-leaf Viburnums.
Besides reproducing by fruit, Maple-leaf Viburnums are also known to create large clonal patches “by means of suckers, root sprouts, and rooting of decumbent aerial shoots.” This can create a particularly lovely effect in fall, when those soft, maple-shaped leaves turn a brilliant orange or a lovely purple. Unfortunately, those leaves are vulnerable to the Viburnum Leaf Beetle, a Eurasian species found in North American since the 1920s.
Sense of Place 