Hackberry

Description:

Nobody talks about the hackberry; it’s just a plain jane in the landscape. Or so they say. Everyone forgets about the clean branch structure providing shade, brown berries attracting the birds, and sandpaper leaves feeding the hackberry emperor butterfly.  But the hackberry has another attribute that trumps all these—grit.

This scrappy native tree refuses to die unless absolutely necessary.  It toughs its way through heat, drought, flood, salt, tornado, hurricane, nuclear bombing…you get the idea. Its life may be terrible, but it will hang on anyway. You can’t really blame the tree for not giving you pink flowers when it lives in a salty gravel pit.

For all the hackberry’s grit, it still prefers moist limestone soil like any sensible tree. It also has an archenemy–the hackberry woolly aphid. If your tree is infested, the hackberry will probably refuse to die, but the aphids will make you and the tree miserable, so some type of pest control is a good idea. Take care of it or not—as you choose, but respect the hackberry either way. It deserves it.