XXXVI. 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 varlous 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 drmk 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 m 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 which attacks the barberry, (cidiwm berbéridis,) 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 Kcidium. 
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. 
