XXXVIII. THE COMMON BARBERRY. 523 



and bark of the root. In this Commonwealth, it is much used 

 to give a yellow color to leather. 



The leaves have an agreeable acidity and have sometimes 

 been used as a substitute for sorrel. The berries, which are so 

 exceedingly sour as to need no protection against birds, are 

 sometimes pickled; they are also preserved in various ways 

 with sugar, and then are considered pleasant and wholesome. 

 In some parts of Europe they supply the place of lemon in fla- 

 voring punch. Bruised, they make a refreshing drink in fevers. 

 The bark has been used for its purgative and tonic qualities, — 

 and various parts of the plant for their great astringency. 



The barberry is admirably well adapted to enter into the com- 

 position of a hedge, from the multitude of its shoots and the 

 sharpness of its spines. There is, however, in this country as 

 well as in England, a prejudice against it, from the belief that 

 it produces the blight in wheat. Prof. Martyn urges against 

 this opinion, the fact that it abounds in the hedges in Saffron 

 Walden, in Essex, England, which enclose fields in which wheat 

 is cultivated constantly and with entire success. And Dr. Gre- 

 ville, in his Scottish Cryptogamic Flora, has shown that the 

 mildew Avhich attacks the barberry, (JEcxdium berberidis,) is 

 quite different from the fungus which occasions mildew in wheat, 

 which is a kind of Uredo, entirely remote in its botanical cha- 

 racters from an iEcidium. 



In the neighborhood of Boston the barberry propagates itself 

 readily and rapidly by seed and by the multitude of suckers 

 which it throws up. In those parts of the State in which it has 

 been found by experience that wheat is not a profitable crop, 

 there can be no objection, on the score of its danger, to the use 

 of the barberry as a hedge. The beauty of the plant, the rapid- 

 ity of its growth when young, its durability, — for a stock, though 

 so easily established, lives very many years, — Loudon says, one 

 or two centuries, — the sharpness and great number of its pric- 

 kles, the closeness with which it springs up, and the readiness 

 with which it submits to the knife, are strong recommendations. 

 On some lanes in Brookline and other places in the vicinity of 

 Boston, a natural hedge of barberry, sweet briar, wild rose and 

 privet has formed a most graceful border for the road-side. 



