I’ve recently been interested in growing Bayberry trees (Myrica pensylvanica for the Northern variety and Myrica cerifera for the Southern variety a.k.a. Wax Myrtle). I got pretty excited to be able to make candles from the wax that coats the exterior of the berries. However, I found some info that has made me hesitate purchasing a bayberry plant of my own. Unfortunately, bayberries are not edible berries for humans. They are great for birds (and probably for chickens too) and the wax would be a major boon for homesteading.
Collecting the Berry Wax
So, yes, you can boil the berries to melt the wax coating off of the berries and collect the melted wax. Apparently, there is very little wax on the berries. You need thousands of berries to make a 2oz candle. At first glance, this seems like way too much effort and way too many berries. After thinking about it a little more, it might not be so bad. They’re also nitrogen-fixing native plants, so they’d be good for areas with poor soils.
Bayberry trees develop fairly small berries, so I could probably fit thousands of berries into a large pasta pot, canning pot, or crab pot. Wax melts at a lower temperature than water boils. The bayberry wax has a typical melting temperature between 102°F (39°C) and 120°F (49°C), which is about half the temperature of boiling water at 212°F (100°F). Though there is not a lot of wax on each individual berry, it shouldn’t take a lot of energy to melt the wax off and make a bayberry candle. I could probably even collect the berries in the winter and save them until the summer. I could put them in a makeshift solar oven (maybe just a disposable aluminum roaster pan with a clear top, like I used for winter sowing of perennial seeds) to melt the wax.
Thousands of Berries Means Multiple Plants
So, if I need thousands of berries, I’m probably going to need a few bayberry plants. Since permaculture is a long-term endeavor, I just need to get 2 to 4 plants started soon. Then I can let them grow and take cuttings to propagate them, or let the birds eat the berries for a couple of years and spread the seeds.
The issue I’ve run into with buying waxberry plants (note: waxberry is another name for bayberry, but I’m just going to use that as a general term for bayberry and wax myrtle since they serve the same function and are often confused anyway) is that you need both a female and male plant to get berries. Unfortunately, these plants are often just used as ornamental hedges, so most nurseries don’t know the sex of the plant that they’re going to give you. This is unless it already has berries, but that would be a much more expensive plant than just a seedling.
So, I was able to find one nursery – Broken Arrow Nursery – that is selling seedling clones of bayberry plants, so they know the sex of the plants. I think I’m just going to buy those. I don’t want to 1) have to buy several saplings in the hopes of getting at least 1 male and 1 female, and 2) I don’t want to fork over the money for a mature plant.
The Asian Bayberry is very different from the North American Bayberry
Myrica rubra is the Asian bayberry and is also called the Chinese Bayberry, and a number of other names likes red bayberry, waxberry, Chinese Strawberry, and my favorite, Yumberry. Those are obviously the anglicized names. It is known as yangmei in China and yamamomo in Japan. Unfortunately, to a novice bayberry enthusiast like me, there don’t seem to be any similarities between the Asian and North American Bayberries, other than their names.
Even though one of the names for the Asian bayberry is waxberry, there is not any wax on the Asian bayberry. I’ll admit that the leaves kind of look similar, but the berries of these two species look totally different. They should not both have the same common name! I guess I’ve finally found the hill I’m going to die on…
Taxonomy of Trees is Tough
To me, the Asian bayberry red fruit looks way more like the Strawberry Tree Arbutus unedo. This tree itself is unrelated to the common strawberry in the genus Fragaria. The Strawberry tree is native to the Mediterranean Basin and Western Europe. It is sometimes even called the Irish Strawberry Tree because it grows in Ireland.
So, I guess the moral of the story is that both names and looks can be deceiving when trying to understand botanical relationships.