Before Christmas, I started talking about how to tell shrubs and trees in winter, but I got sidetracked. One of the shrubs with opposite buds that is quite fascinating is soapberry or soopolallie because it does not have bud scales. Bud scales are small leaf-shaped structures designed to protect the bud during dormancy.
Soapberry is one of a few shrubs that do not have bud scales, perhaps because the tiny overwintering parts (leaf and flower buds) are covered in whitish-silvery hairs on the inside and brown scaly flat hairs on the outside. The hairs protect them from losing water and desiccating or freezing.
The leaf buds consist of two miniature leaves, rounded and pointed upward. One of my college students noted they looked like a pair of praying hands (like praying shepherds) which helped him learn the Latin name – Shepherdia canadensis.
The flower buds are in the axil or angle between the vertical twig and the side branch. Flowers open shortly before the leaves and are among the first plants to flower in spring - right about now.
Male and female flowers are pale yellow-green to brownish, very tiny and occur on different plants (dioecious). The males have several stamens sticking outward, whereas the females only have one ovary pointing outward.
The fruits of soapberry are red and shiny looking as if they would be juicy and delicious. However, they contain saponin – the same stuff found in soap. Despite their unpleasant soapy taste, the berries were (and still are) highly valued by Indigenous people.
Traditionally berries were whipped into a foam, sometimes adding sweeter fruits such as salmonberries or wild strawberries.
Today, sugar is often used. Since the berries will not foam up if the bowl used is greasy, a special bowl was used only for making this ice-cream-like dessert.
When I gave my students soapberry foam to try, I discovered that, while most found the soapberries bitter, some could not taste the bitterness and loved the foam so much they would eat a whole bowl full.
Soapberry prefers to grow in the drier interior country, so berries were traded with coastal people along the grease trails in exchange for eulachon (oolichan) grease and ocean foods.
Typically, they ate soapberry dessert eaten after a meal to cleanse the mouth by cutting the oiliness of the main meal, but some report it can be eaten before a meal to stimulate the appetite.
