This week for Flora and Fauna Friday the subject is a flammable, fragrant foliage: the Southern Wax-Myrtle (Morella cerifera).
The Southern Wax-Myrtle is one of those inescapable fixtures of Edisto’s flora. A shrub found on every causeway, woodlot, lawn, and hammock. It is quick to grow almost anywhere thanks to its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen and tolerance of flooding, drought, and salinity. It’s unkempt, swelling body of leaves hovers above the ground on gnarled, twisting trunks of gray ringed in white. The leaves are simple and plain of shape but more unique in their details. Those piney, evergreen leaves wear a dull sheen pocked by minute dimples while radiating an aura of yellow. That appearance is belayed by a trait of Wax-Myrtle, its fragrance. Wax-Myrtle has a spicy, pungent scent produced by a cocktail of chemicals found in the yellow pinprick resin glands that pepper its leaves. These chemicals ward off herbivores of both the six and four-legged varieties. Yet, Wax-Myrtle has use for the two-legged types.
Wax-Myrtles are a dioecious plant, having both male and female trees. Its flowers are a twisted affair of green and red nodules that arise from its stems. Male flowers are larger and more open but both sexes rather innocuous. Female Wax-Myrtles come to bear a buffet of berries as we enter autumn but these teeny blue-gray berries are not sweet, they’re greasy. Or more precisely, they’re waxy. The berries of the Southern Wax-Myrtle are the staple in the winter diet of the Myrtle Warbler. These normally insectivorous birds have developed a mutualistic relationship with the Wax-Myrtle. The fatty fruits provide an easily digestible, calorie dense bounty for the warbler to survive on through the winter. In return these petite songbirds spread the seeds of the Wax-Myrtle throughout every inch of South Carolina. The berries are also of use to people as they can be gathered and boiled to yield wax for candle making. This is where the wax for bayberry candles comes from. This waxy coating also extends to the leaves of Wax-Myrtle making them both drought resistant and highly flammable. So I wouldn’t recommend planting them next to your fire pit or propane tank.
