Salal (Gaultheria shallon) is a small shrub common throughout upper North America’s coastal strip. It charms the forest understory with curious spring and summer blooms and evergreen foliage throughout the seasons.
Blooms
Salal’s distinguishing feature is its pendant blooms that appear like strands of fuzzy pearls. The unique form of an individual salal flower is created by its five petals that are fused into a balloon-like corolla with only a small opening at its lower end, framed by the petals’ recurving tips. Each flower is capped by a star-like calyx of five sepals1Sepals are modified leaves that enclose a flower bud before it opens and are usually green. where it joins the short stem, or, pedicel2A pedicel is the stem that joins an individual flower to the main stalk of an inflorescence. that connects it to the main flower stalk. Curiously, these sepals become its fruit later on. (See “Fruit” below.) Conspicuous bracts3Bracts are leaves that occur within or just below a flower cluster and often differ in size, form, and sometimes color from ordinary leaves. top each pedicel like bows. Additional bracts may also appear halfway down the pedicel itself. The stem, pedicels, and sepals are often the same luminous white or rosy pink as the flowers, but also occur in contrasting green to nearly red. Each stem produces up to fifteen blossoms. A short fuzz of glandular hairs4Plants do not produce “hairs” as animals do, but similar-looking structures called trichomes that serve varying functions ranging from protection from predators and elements, facilitation of pollination, and capture of food sources. covers the entire flower stem, the pedicels, the calyces, and the petals, rendering their surfaces sticky enough to catch animal hairs, wind-borne seeds of other plants, and random miscellaneous bits. These inflorescences are typically borne singly from branch tips and leaf axils, but occasionally fork at their bases to form small clusters. They hang more or less horizontally, lending the entire plant a graceful air.
Salal blooms heavily in spring and then intermittently until frost, sometimes possessing both flowers and fruits at the same time.
Fruit
The development of salal’s fruit is unusual, although not uncommon among flowering plants. Rather than forming from the flower’s enlarged ovary5The ovary is the female organ at the base of a plant’s female reproductive structure that produces seed and typically becomes the fruit or other layer around it. Together with the stigma that receives pollen and is typically attached to the ovary by a style, it comprises the pistil. after pollination, the berry-like seed capsule instead arises from the sepals at the top of the bloom that first encase the bud before it opens. This star-shaped calyx persists after the petals fade and envelops the maturing seed in a soft, somewhat mealy flesh, resulting in the unique crosshatched pattern where its points meet at the end of the seed capsule. Ripening to deep blue or blackish purple, the seed capsule holds over 100 small seeds.
Plant Features
Salal ranges in height from a groundcover of 1.5 feet / 0.5 meters to a shrub of up to 10 feet / 3 meters. Its height is largely influenced by available moisture. It is loosely to densely branched with willowy stems of evergreen leaves. The leathery (almost plastic-like) leaves alternate along opposite sides of the stem and are elliptical in shape, finely toothed, pointed at the tip, and up to 4 inches / 10 cm long. They are medium green on their upper surface and brighter green below with a satiny, smooth surface laced with a network of veins branching from a prominent midrib. The plant’s twigs are reddish to light brown, beginning smooth and shredding as the bark ages and sheds. In overall appearance, the plant (although not the blooms) is quite similar to the distantly related camellias (Camellia spp.) familiar in domestic gardens.
In addition to its regular roots, salal also produces underground rhizomes6Rhizomes are thickened stems that grow along or under the soil surface and bear shoots above and roots below. that spread outward and send up new branches, sometimes forming a dense groundcover. Thus, many individuals in a population of salal that appear to be distinct are actually far-ranging offshoots of the same plant or are clones of one another. In addition, salal’s above-ground stems also root and form new plants where they touch the ground, further contributing to its asexual proliferation and dense habit.
Range and Habitat
Salal ranges the North American Pacific coast from Alaska south to California, extending as far east as the Cascade Mountains. Within that relatively narrow band, it occupies a spectrum of habitats from sea level to mid elevation, including both damp and dry sites across dunes, forests, and bogland borders. It reaches its maximum size in moist, lower elevation conifer and mixed woodland where there is little winter snow accumulation and a high tree canopy that permits ample light penetration, as in the accompanying habitat photo from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
Similar Species
Two high-elevation cousins overlap with the upland reaches of salal’s range: western tea-berry (Gaultheria ovatifolia) and alpine wintergreen (Gaultheria humifusa). Western tea-berry looks quite similar, but has a smaller, ground-hugging form with more rounded leaves, open, bell-like blooms reminiscent of heath flowers, and carmine seed capsules. Alpine wintergreen appears very similar to the western tea-berry, but even less like salal, with nearly round, light green leaves, open, bell-shaped flowers, and red seed capsules.
Unusual Specimen
The salal in the accompanying photo displays variegation on several leaves. Variegation is a difference in a plant’s pigmentation, often resulting from lack of chlorophyll in some of its tissues. It most often results from a genetic mutation, but can also arise from cellular damage caused by pathogens or other environmental factors. Variegated tissue is typically white, unless other pigments are present and become apparent when not masked by chlorophyll. A plant can survive with surprisingly little chlorophyll; however, the less chlorophyll it possesses, the slower it grows, as it manufactures energy from sunlight at a much slower pace than a fully pigmented plant. For this reason, variegated plants are uncommon in nature because they are almost always outcompeted by neighbors that are fully green.
Gallery
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