Shrubs Of The Great Basin: A Natural History

Twinberry

Twinberry Lonicera involucrata THE TWINBERRY is another of our shrubs that just skirts the Great Basin. In California, it extends from sea level to 9,500 feet and occurs on the east, em slope of the Sierra Nevada. Twinberry extends north into Alaska, east across Canada to Quebec, and south through Colorado and Utah to New Mexico and Arizona and on into Mexico. Wherever it grows, it prefers moist, humid locales, and perhaps for this reason it does not get far into the Great Basin. The deciduous leaves and stems of twinberry are paired at the nodes, and the individual leaves are oval and pointed, dark green above and somewhat paler and finely pubescent beneath. They vary in length from 5 to 12 cen, timeters. A somewhat lax shrub, twinberry is generally around a meter tall, but sometimes, in favorable locales, it grows to 3 meters. Individual flowers are borne in pairs on a long stalk. Each pair of flowers have at the base two bracts (really four, but not obviously so), which are partially united into a kind of cup or involucre. These bracts enlarge and tum red as the fruits rna, ture. The flowers are yellow, sometimes with a reddish tinge. They are about a centimeter long, with five petals united into a cylindrical tube; nectar is secreted at the base of this tube in a shallow cup. A cylindrical, fused flower such as this helps the plant restrict its kinds of pollinators and insures more efficient pollination. Bees appear to be the most important pollinators of the twinberry, although hummingbirds are frequent visitors. Another species of Lonicera which gets to the fringes of the Great Basin is L. utahensis, the Utah honeysuckle. This species differs from the twinberry in having blunt,tipped leaves only 2.5 to 6 centimeters long and white, or at most light yellow, flowers. Despite the name, it occurs in northern Cali, fornia, although not on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, and extends 243 Twinberry Double Honeysuckle CAPRIFOLIACEAE through the Northwest and Canada into Idaho and then down into Utah. This particular species was first collected by Sereno Watson in 1871 in the "Wahsatch" Mountains, Utah, in Cottonwood Canyon at 9,000 feet. Still another honeysuckle, found in western Nevada and particularly abundant in the Lake Tahoe area, is the double honeysuckle, L. conjugialis, in which the bracts below the purplish black flowers are very small, unlike the large bracts of the twinberry. The double honeysuckle also has much smaller leaves, 2 to 6 centimeters long. This is a plant of the Sierras and the Northwest, however; it does not adjoin the northern and eastern portions of the Great Basin, as do twinberry and Utah honeysuckle. Twinberry obviously gets its name from the paired black berries, each about 8 millimeters in diameter, that mature from the fertilized pistils. AI, though one book on edible wild plants characterizes the berries as pleasant, tasting, most would agree that they are bitter or sour at best. Since the Euro, pean species of honeysuckle produce berries which are definitely poisonous, and the fruits of all honeysuckle species are regarded as emetic and cathar, tic, they are better avoided in favor of something less dubious. As forage, twinberry appears to be of value only for deer and other wildlife. Twinberry and the honeysuckles belong to the honeysuckle family, the Caprifoliaceae. The elderberries and snowberries also belong to this family, whose characteristics are covered under the discussion of the elderberries. The genus Lonicera gets its name from Adam Lonitzer, a German herbalist of the sixteenth century. There are about 150 species of honeysuckle, dis, tributed primarily throughout the north temperate zone. The species name involucrata refers to the two united bracts beneath the paired flowers. The double honeysuckle, L. conjugialis, is so named from the two fruits which, unlike those of the twinberry, are fused together at maturity. The twinberry also goes by other colorful names: bearberry honeysuckle, fly honeysuckle, skunkberry, black twinberry, and inkberry. ...