Toyon

California's Christmas berry: a tough evergreen chaparral shrub with flat white summer flowers that native bees swarm and bright red berry clusters that hold through winter until a flock strips them. The forgiving one of the chaparral trio - it takes shade, clay and pruning.

Sun to part shade, ordinary well-drained soil including clay, and deep infrequent water while establishing. Plant in fall, allow 10-15 feet of room, and expect a tough long-lived shrub that asks very little.

Toyon is easy by the standards of California natives. It takes full sun to part shade — more shade than most chaparral shrubs, which is why it grows happily under oaks — and it accepts a wide range of soils including the clay that kills manzanita, as long as water is not standing on it. Give it lean, unamended ground and no fertilizer; rich soil only pushes soft growth.

Plant in autumn with the first rains and give it room. A garden toyon settles at 8-15 feet tall and wide, and old plants in good conditions reach 25 feet or more, so site it as a screen, a background shrub, or a future small tree rather than squeezing it into a border. Water a new plant deeply every couple of weeks through its first two dry summers, then taper off. Established coastal plants need nothing; inland, a deep soak once a month in high summer keeps the foliage fresh and improves berry set.

The rule that still applies is deep and infrequent. Toyon tolerates far more summer water than its chaparral neighbours, but frequent shallow watering in warm soil, a daily lawn sprinkler pattern, or a low spot that ponds in winter will rot it just the same. Keep the crown proud of the soil surface and, on heavy ground, plant on a slight slope or mound.

Very low care, and unlike ceanothus and manzanita it genuinely takes pruning - shape, hedge or limb it up in late winter after the birds have finished. Watch for fire blight in a warm wet early summer.

An established toyon needs almost nothing: no feeding, little or no water, and no staking. What sets it apart from the rest of the chaparral palette is that it takes pruning well. It resprouts freely from old wood and from a woody basal burl, so you can shear it as an informal hedge, thin it to show the branch structure, or limb it up over several years into a multi-trunked small tree. Do the work in late winter or very early spring, after the birds have stripped the berries and before growth starts. Prune later and you cut off the flower clusters, and with them that winter's berries.

Three things to keep an eye on. Fire blight: toyon is in the rose family and can get the same bacterial disease as apples and pears, showing up as blackened flower clusters and shoot tips hooked over like a shepherd's crook after a warm, wet early summer. Cut well below the damage, in dry weather, sterilizing between cuts. Toyon thrips: curled, thickened spring leaves, permanently distorted and almost entirely cosmetic — leave them. Deer: they browse it, but established plants simply regrow above the browse line; young plants need a cage.

And in wildfire country, treat it as chaparral. Keep woody shrubs out of the first five feet around a building, clear dead material from inside the plant, and follow your local defensible-space guidance.

Pick full-red berry clusters from late autumn and cook them - roasted, boiled or dried. Raw berries are astringent and carry cyanogenic compounds. Leave most of the crop for the winter birds, and never cut branches from a wild plant.

Toyon berries colour from green through orange to bright red between late October and December, and a mature shrub can carry an enormous crop. Pick full-red clusters and strip the berries.

Then cook them. This is not optional. Raw toyon berries are harshly astringent and, like other rose-family fruit, the plant carries cyanogenic glycosides concentrated in the seeds and leaves — the bitterness is the warning. Heat and drying drive those compounds off and the astringency with them, which is precisely what the traditional California preparations do: berries were parched or roasted in a basket with hot coals, or boiled, or spread to dry for weeks, after which they become mildly sweet and faintly apple-like. Modern cooks roast them in a low oven, or simmer and strain them into a tart jelly or a spiced cider. Do not serve them raw, and do not let children graze the shrub.

Take a bowlful and leave the rest. The whole point of a berry that hangs on into midwinter is that it feeds birds through the leanest weeks of the year.

One more rule, and it is a legal one. Do not cut berried branches from wild toyon. In California, taking plant material from land you do not own requires the landowner's written permission, and toyon in particular was protected after Christmas-greens cutting stripped the hills around Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Grow your own shrub and cut from that.

Dried berries keep for months in a jar and are the traditional way to hold a crop; cooked jelly or syrup keeps like any preserve. Seed is best sown fresh rather than stored.

Drying is the traditional and still the best way to keep toyon. Spread cleaned berries in a single layer somewhere warm and airy, or use a dehydrator on low, until they are hard and leathery. Dried berries keep for many months in a sealed jar in a cool cupboard, and the long drying itself does much of the work of removing the astringency — though they are still better toasted or simmered before use. Ground dried berries were traditionally worked into meal and cakes.

Cooked preserves keep as any preserve does. Simmer, strain out the seeds, sweeten, and set into a jelly, or reduce to a spiced syrup; either keeps refrigerated for weeks or processed for far longer. Toyon is low in pectin, so add some.

For seed, do the opposite: do not store it. Toyon seed germinates best fresh, so squeeze the pulp off ripe berries, rinse the seed clean, and sow it the same autumn. If you must hold it a few weeks, keep it cool and slightly damp rather than letting it dry hard.

The easiest of the chaparral shrubs to raise: clean fresh seed from ripe berries and sow it in autumn - no fire treatment, no scarification, no long stratification. Cuttings work but are slower and less reliable.

After the fussiness of ceanothus and manzanita, toyon is a relief. Squeeze the pulp off fresh ripe berries in autumn, rinse the seed clean of every trace of flesh, and sow it straight away — in deep pots of a gritty, free-draining mix, or directly where you want the plant. It needs no fire cue, no scarification, and no long cold stratification; a few weeks of cool moist winter conditions is plenty, and germination is usually good and reasonably prompt. Sow more than you need, grow the seedlings on for a season in deep containers to accommodate the taproot, and plant them out small in their second autumn.

Cuttings are possible but slower. Take semi-hardwood cuttings of the current season's growth in late summer, use rooting hormone, and set them in a gritty mix with bottom heat and humidity; rooting is variable and can take months. Since toyon is a single species with very few named selections, seed is almost always the right answer — the exceptions are the yellow-berried and island forms, which must be propagated vegetatively to come true.

The plant also renews itself from below. Toyon carries a woody basal burl and resprouts vigorously after fire or hard cutting, which is why an old shrub can be renovated rather than replaced — the opposite of every other rule on this page's neighbouring plants.

Cooked berries are a modest traditional food, tart and mildly sweet with the astringency driven off. The plant's larger contribution is ecological: heavy native bee forage at the driest point of summer, and berries that carry birds through midwinter.

Cooked toyon berries are a real if modest food — tart, mildly sweet, faintly apple-like, with some sugars, pectin-poor flesh and the dark-red pigments common to rose-family fruit. Raw they are not a food at all, being astringent and cyanogenic, so every nutritional claim about them assumes roasting, boiling or long drying first. As a crop it is a bowl of jelly, not a harvest.

The ecological account is much larger, and like manzanita's it is a story about timing. Toyon flowers in June and July, the point in a Mediterranean year when the annual wildflowers have finished and the landscape has gone dry, and its broad flat flower heads are accessible to short-tongued insects — so it draws a huge and varied crowd of native bees, hoverflies, small butterflies and beetles when they most need it. Then the fruit ripens in November and hangs, so that when midwinter arrives and nothing else is fruiting, a flock of cedar waxwings, American robins, mockingbirds or band-tailed pigeons can strip a shrub and move on fed.

Add dense evergreen structure for nesting and cover, and a deep root system that holds slopes through winter storms, and toyon earns its place several times over before anyone picks a berry.

A staple California food cooked for millennia by the Chumash, Tongva and their neighbours, the Christmas green that Los Angeles cut so heavily it had to be protected, and the city's official native plant - though the story that Hollywood was named for it is doubted.

Toyon has fed people in California for thousands of years. The Chumash, Tongva and neighbouring peoples gathered the berries in quantity and parched them in baskets with hot coals, boiled them, or dried them for weeks before eating or grinding them into meal — preparations that, we now understand, drove off the cyanogenic compounds and the astringency together. Leaves and bark had traditional medicinal uses as washes and infusions; those are historical records rather than recommendations, and the leaves are not a garden tea. The name toyon itself comes to English through Spanish from an Indigenous Californian word.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the shrub met a very different fate. Its red berries and glossy toothed leaves made an obvious substitute for European holly, and Angelenos cut it by the wagonload for Christmas decoration until the hills around the city were being stripped. California restricted the collection of toyon from public land in response, and the general rule still stands: taking plant material from land you do not own requires the owner's written permission. Grow it and cut your own.

The famous claim that Hollywood was named for the California holly on its hills is repeated everywhere and doubted by most historians, who trace the name to the Wilcox and Whitley families in the 1880s and 1890s. What is not in doubt is the affection: in 2012 Los Angeles named toyon its official native plant.

No berries usually means spring pruning cut off the flowers; curled leaves are harmless thrips; blackened hooked shoots are fire blight. It tolerates far more than its chaparral neighbours, but daily sprinkler water still rots it.

No berries this year: the usual cause is pruning at the wrong time — toyon flowers in early summer on that season's growth, so a spring or early-summer cut removes the flower clusters. Prune in late winter instead. A very young plant (under three or four years) may simply not be ready, and heavy shade reduces cropping. Berries all gone overnight: a flock of waxwings or robins found them. That is the plant working; it is not a pest problem. New leaves tightly curled and thickened: toyon thrips — permanent on those leaves, harmless to the shrub, not worth spraying. Blackened flower clusters and shoot tips bent into a hook: fire blight. Cut at least a foot below the visible damage in dry weather, sterilizing the blade between every cut, and bin the prunings. Wilting although the soil is damp: root rot — almost always a daily sprinkler pattern or a spot that ponds in winter. Water deeply and rarely instead, and do not water it more. Leggy and bare at the base: either shade or deer browsing; toyon resprouts well, so cut it back hard in late winter and let it rebuild, or limb it up deliberately into a tree. Sooty black film on leaves: usually scale or aphid honeydew on a stressed plant — check the stem undersides, and improve airflow and vigour. Yellowing between green veins: waterlogged or alkaline soil; improve the drainage.

A California plant for dry-summer, mild-winter regions - roughly zones 8-10 - and the most adaptable of the chaparral shrubs within them, taking shade, clay, coastal wind and inland heat. Humid-summer and cold-winter regions are out.

Coastal California (zones 9-10): effortless, and the shrub is at its largest and leafiest here; it takes salt wind and fog and needs no summer water at all. Inland valleys and Sierra foothills (zones 8-9): excellent, with a deep soak once a month through high summer improving both foliage and berry set; give it afternoon shade where summers are extreme. Southern California and the coastal Southwest: reliable and widely planted, tolerating heat and reflected warmth better than most natives. Pacific Northwest (zone 8): grown successfully in milder gardens with sharp drainage; the risk is cold on wet roots rather than the cold alone.

The limits are real. Toyon is hardy to somewhere around 10 to 15°F — young plants less — which puts it out of reach below about zone 8, and hard freezes damage foliage and berries even where the plant survives. It also dislikes humid summers, so the Southeast and most of the East are unsuitable however carefully it is sited; warm damp soil and warm damp air together bring on both root rot and fire blight.

Within its range, though, this is the adaptable one. It handles more shade, more clay, more summer water and far more pruning than ceanothus or manzanita, which is why it is the chaparral shrub to reach for when a site is difficult or a gardener is new to California natives.