Flowers: inconspicuous cream colored

Foliage: Deciduous, opposite, lanceolate to 4" long and 1" wide on green stems.

Exposure: Performs best in part shade

Water: Medium. Water well when young

Habit: Thicket-forming to six feet with open habit

Uses: Native mixed border, informal hedge, woodland massing, wildlife habitat, fall show.

Notes: I’ve come to admire strawberry bush, brook euonymus, ‘Hearts-a-Burstin’ - or whatever else common name exists - as a special native landscape plant that really is a special feature in the woods of East Texas. Deer find the plant hard to pass by and are taking a heavy toll on this preferred browse in areas where their numbers are great. The key feature of this green-stemmed shrub is the fall fruit display. Scarlet capsules open to reveal bright orange seed (Dirr calls the seed scarlet but we’ll stick with orange!). The fruit show persists for about a month. In fruit, this plant always elicits a favorable response. While supposedly susceptible to all of the maladies of Euonymus, we have not experienced much trouble with scale or whiteflies in the garden.

There are several hard-to-find clones in the trade. From time to time, Woodlanders has sold a Florida ecotype touted as evergreen; it has been semi-deciduous for us, leafing out early with thin leaves that persist into the winter but this clone has not been blessed with much of a fruit display. There is another "narrow-leaf" clone floating around that appears to have few significant attributes over the normal range of clones. We have one "northern" clone that puts on a brief showy fall foliage display, a kind of whitish cream splash under the patriarch pines in the Arboretum.

Propagation is easy. Seed should be treated with a three-month warm stratification followed by three or four months of cold moist. Cuttings can be rooted any time of the year and the plant, being a thicket former, is easy to divide and multiply for the landscape.

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