Mr. Beale's barberry

This town is full of noxious invasive aliens -- weeds. Saturday I hiked up Water Street, which like many platted streets in Eureka Springs, is an overgrown entanglement. It runs up the valley between Steele and Douglas Sts. toward Lake Eureka.

There, naturalized along the little creek and hillsides, is an increasing population of Beale's barberry, or Leatherleaf mahonia, Mahonia bealei, also known as Berberis bealei. The genus Mahonia has 60 species, about half which are native to China; the others from the Pacific Northwest, Central America and Western South America.

The naturalized Beale's barberry in the Water Street drainage was first described by English plant collector, Robert Fortune, in 1850 (as Berberis bealei), and then in 1854, renamed Mahonia bealei.

Its native range is mountain thickets and stream banks in much of central and eastern China. Robert Fortune was employed by the British East India Company to collect (steal) tea plants from China and establish them in British India. He also sent Chinese plants suitable for English gardens to the nurseries of Standish and Noble, at Ascot in England. "After three more years of travel in the far East, I return to find many of my Chinese pets in high favour, and occupying the places in our gardens which they so richly merit."

Of Berberis Bealei, Fortune recounts, "The first was met with in the autumn of 1848. I was then travelling in the district of Hwuychow [Weizhou, Anhui Province], a place famed for its green teas... the discovery is described in my journal as follows: -- "Having taken a survey of the place [an old garden], we were on our way out, when an extraordinary plant growing in a secluded part of the garden met my eyes. The shrub was about eight feet high, much branched and far surpassed in beauty all the other known species of Mahonia. I have no doubt that it is quite as hardy as an English holly; and, if it proves so, it will be one of the boldest evergreen bushes of which our gardens can boast." (Journal of the Horticultural Society of London).

Hence, Mr. Fortune's early Victorian era (error?) gift of the bold and beautiful Mr. Beale's Chinese barberry to English horticulture is the origin of this happy tall alien in our woods.