Mapleleaf viburnum

Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

Arizona Mountains forests

Atlantic coastal pine barrens

Blue Mountains forests

Central Pacific Northwest coastal forests

Central Tallgrass prairie

Central-Southern Cascades Forests

What it needs

Conditions

Light

Full sun / Part sun / Part shade

Water

Moderate water

Spacing

4 ft

Habit

A small, rounded, suckering, deciduous woodland shrub. Missouri Botanical Garden gives 3 to 6 feet tall and 2 to 4 feet wide; the Wildflower Center describes a low densely branched shrub to about 6 feet and Wikipedia gives 3.3 to 6.6 feet, so all three cited sources agree on a plant that stays waist to shoulder height. That is the single most important number on this record, because every other native viburnum in this catalog is several times larger: this catalog records arrowwood viburnum at 6 to 15 feet, and blackhaw viburnum and nannyberry both reach small-tree size. The stems are slender and the branching is dense and low rather than upright and vase-shaped. Leaves are opposite, 2 to 5 inches long, ovate to rounded, coarsely toothed and three-lobed with palmate venation - a red-maple leaf on a shrub, which is exactly what the epithet acerifolium says - dull to medium green above, pale and softly hairy beneath, and carrying small black glandular spots on the underside that are worth a hand lens because no other viburnum here has them. Individual stems are short-lived and the plant renews itself from below: it suckers from the root system and, in the Wildflower Center phrase, forms large, loose, open colonies. Read the habit as a slowly widening patch of low stems under a canopy rather than as a shrub with an outline.

Care tips

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Use it for the site nothing else will take. Dry shade under a mature hardwood is the hardest ground most gardeners own, and this is one of the few flowering shrubs that genuinely wants it - Missouri Botanical Garden calls it more shade tolerant than many other viburnums and the Wildflower Center rates its drought tolerance high on dry rocky soils. Buying it for a sunny border wastes the one thing it is better at than every other viburnum in this catalog.

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Match the size to the space before anything else. At 3 to 6 feet tall and 2 to 4 feet wide it is a fraction of arrowwood, blackhaw or nannyberry, and that is a feature rather than a shortfall: it is the viburnum that fits UNDER a canopy rather than competing with one. If the brief calls for a screen or a hedge above head height, this is the wrong species and nannyberry is the right one.

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Decide about the suckers in year five, not year fifteen. The Wildflower Center says it suckers profusely into large loose open colonies and Missouri Botanical Garden says it will naturalize by suckering if suckers are not removed. Both of those are the same sentence pointed at different gardeners. Choose the colony and the maintenance is close to zero; choose the specimen and it is an annual job forever.

Lifecycle

Planting

Missouri Botanical Garden calls it easily grown in average, medium moisture, well-drained soil in full sun to part shade, notes that it prefers moist loams but tolerates a wide range of soils, and states plainly that it is generally more shade tolerant than many of the other species of Viburnum. The Wildflower Center extends the light range to full shade and the soil range to dry rocky ground, listing sandy, sandy loam, medium loam, clay loam and clay, and gives an acidic preference below about pH 6.8; Wikipedia narrows that to pH 5.0 to 6.5 with tolerance to 7.5. Plant it in spring or autumn under an existing canopy and give it the acid woodland soil it evolved in rather than trying to improve the site. Do not plant it where a specimen outline matters, because it will not keep one.

Transplanting

Container stock establishes readily while young. An established colony cannot be moved as a unit, but it does not need to be: a rooted sucker lifted from the edge of the patch with a spade in early spring is already a plant, and that is by far the cheapest way to extend a shaded planting. Keep the roots damp and replant the same day.

Early growth

Water through the first two seasons while the roots take hold, then largely leave it alone. Missouri Botanical Garden rates maintenance LOW and says established plants have some drought tolerance; the Wildflower Center goes further and rates drought tolerance HIGH. Both ratings assume the planting this shrub is actually for - a naturalised woodland group left to spread - and neither describes what it costs to hold it inside a border edge, which is an annual sucker-removal job for as long as the plant lives.

Maturity

The two primary sources disagree here and the disagreement matters, so this record carries both rather than picking one. Missouri Botanical Garden reports no serious insect or disease problems. The Wildflower Center, in its conditions comments, says the species is susceptible to viburnum leaf beetle. Viburnum leaf beetle (Pyrrhalta viburni) is an introduced defoliator that has spread through the northeast and can strip a susceptible viburnum in successive years, and susceptibility varies sharply between viburnum species, so a gardener inside the beetle range should treat the Wildflower Center warning as the operative one and check local extension guidance before planting a block of it. Beyond that the plant is genuinely undemanding, and Missouri Botanical Garden rates its maintenance low: prune as needed immediately after flowering, which is the only pruning instruction either source gives.

Propagation

Rooted suckers are the obvious route and the one the plant offers for free. Seed works but wants handling: the Wildflower Center says to collect the fruit as soon as it has turned dark blue-black, store the seeds with the pulp on at 41°F, and stratify if the seed has to be held. Note that suckers are CLONAL, which is the same trap as in the shrub dogwoods and matters more here because this species suckers so freely - a patch propagated entirely from one parent is one genetic individual, and if viburnums are self-incompatible as they are generally reported to be, that patch will flower and set very little fruit. If fruit is part of the brief, buy seed-grown stock or source from two unrelated colonies.

Pollination

Needs cross-pollination

The flowers are perfect, small, white, five-petalled and fully open, presented in a flat-topped cyme that functions as a landing platform, and Wikipedia records a broad visitor list for exactly that architecture: bees in the Andrenidae and Halictidae, flies in the Empididae and Syrphidae, beetles, wasps and butterflies including skippers. What none of the sources cited on this record settles is the breeding system, and that gap is stated rather than papered over - viburnums are generally reported to be self-incompatible, but no source consulted here makes that claim for Viburnum acerifolium specifically. The practical rule holds either way and it follows from the clonality rather than from the genetics. A colony raised from suckers off one parent is ONE genetic individual however wide the patch grows, so a woodland planting propagated the cheap way can flower every year and set almost no fruit. Anyone who wants the red-to-black drupes should establish two or more unrelated plants, ideally seed-grown or lifted from separate wild colonies, within pollinator range of each other.

Plants don't grow alone

Larval host

Butterfly

Spring azure (Celastrina ladon)

Both the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and Wikipedia name mapleleaf viburnum as a larval host for the spring azure (Celastrina ladon), and this is the single strongest ecological argument for the plant. Spring azure larvae feed on flower buds and developing flowers rather than foliage, which is why the host list for this butterfly is a list of late-spring-flowering woody plants - viburnums, dogwoods, New Jersey tea, black cherry. A shaded bed that most gardeners write off as dead ground can carry the food plant for one of the earliest butterflies on the wing in eastern North America.

Larval host

Moth

Hummingbird clearwing moth (Hemaris thysbe)

Hemaris thysbe larvae are recorded on viburnums as well as on honeysuckle and snowberry, so a woodland viburnum colony is a candidate host. Recorded as plausible and not documented because this comes from the general host range of the moth rather than from any source cited on this record, none of which names a moth on Viburnum acerifolium.

Pollinates

Bee

Mining bees (Andrena spp.)

Wikipedia names Andrenidae among the pollinators of this species. Andrena are spring-active ground-nesting bees whose flight period lines up with a late-spring viburnum bloom, and an open shallow cyme is precisely the flower they work. Documented at family level rather than species level, which is why the relationship is wired to the mining-bee group entry rather than to a named bee.

Pollinates

Bee

Sweat bees (Lasioglossum spp.)

Wikipedia names Halictidae alongside the andrenids. Small sweat bees are among the commonest visitors to shallow radially symmetrical flowers presented in a dense platform, and the cyme of a mapleleaf viburnum is that shape at woodland-understorey height where larger bees are scarcer.

Nectar forage

Butterfly

Skipper butterflies (Hesperiidae (family-level entry))

Wikipedia names butterflies including skippers among the flower visitors, and the Wildflower Center records nectar for bees, butterflies and insects generally. A flat-topped cyme is a short-tongued butterfly flower, which is why skippers rather than the long-tongued swallowtails are the group that gets named.

Pollen forage

Fly

Hover flies (flower flies) (Syrphidae)

Syrphidae are named on the Wikipedia visitor list, together with dance flies in the Empididae, which have no entry in this wildlife catalog and are recorded here in prose instead. Hoverflies are pollen feeders as adults and predators of aphids as larvae, so a flowering viburnum in a shaded bed feeds both halves of that life cycle - Wikipedia also notes that the plant attracts aphids.

Fruit forage

Bird

Eastern songbirds (multi-species) (multiple species (Passeriformes))

Both cited horticultural sources record it: Missouri Botanical Garden lists Birds under what the plant attracts, and the Wildflower Center says birds eat the blue berries and files the species under fruit-birds. The crop is a late-summer and autumn one rather than a persistent winter one, so it feeds birds building reserves for migration rather than birds overwintering.

Fruit forage

Bird

Cedar waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum)

Waxwings are among the most fruit-dependent birds in eastern North America and a pea-sized single-stoned drupe is squarely within what they take. Marked plausible rather than documented because neither cited source names a bird species - both stop at the category level - and the fruit crop on a clonal colony is often too light to attract a flock in the first place.

Fruit forage

Bird

American robin (Turdus migratorius)

Robins forage heavily on the woodland floor and take large quantities of small autumn drupes, and a knee-high fruiting shrub puts the crop exactly where they already are. Plausible on the same footing as the waxwing: the general fruit-eating record for the species is firm, but no cited source names the bird.

Fruit forage

Mammal

Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis)

Wikipedia records the berries being eaten by skunks, rabbits, deer, eastern chipmunks, white-footed mice and deer mice - a small-mammal list rather than a bird list, which fits a shrub that fruits within reach of the ground. None of those species has an entry in this wildlife catalog, so they are named here in prose and the relationship is wired to the gray squirrel as the catalogued small mammal with the same habits, marked plausible because no cited source names it.

Foliage forage

Mammal

White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)

The Wildflower Center lists Browse among the wildlife uses and Wikipedia records deer among the animals that eat the fruit. This is not a deer-resistant plant, and neither cited source claims it is - which matters more here than for a tall viburnum, because the whole plant sits inside browse height. In heavy-deer woodland a new planting needs protection for its first years, and a long-browsed colony stays low and thin rather than filling out.

For people

Parts edible

Marginal at best, and the record should not oversell it. The only food claim in the cited set is Wikipedia, which says the black berries available from late summer to autumn can be made into jam. Neither Missouri Botanical Garden nor the Wildflower Center records any human food use, and no cited source describes the raw fruit as pleasant - a single-stoned drupe the size of a pea, thin-fleshed and sharp, is jam material rather than dessert. Only the fully ripe blue-black fruit belongs in that category; the red under-ripe stage is not food. Leaves, bark and roots are not edible, and the historical uses recorded by Wikipedia for the Cherokee, Chippewa, Iroquois and Menominee are medicinal preparations including emetics, not foods, which is the opposite of a licence to eat the plant. Treat the crop as wildlife food and do not extrapolate across the genus: this catalog carries viburnums whose fruit is genuinely good, such as blackhaw and nannyberry, and others that are not worth eating at all.

Edible parts

fruits

Native range

Native across 30 US states + 3 CA provinces.

Worldwide native range.

Native ecoregions

Naturally belongs in 18 ecoregions - its native range crosses a state or province each one spans (not necessarily this exact habitat).

Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests

Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

Atlantic coastal pine barrens

Central Tallgrass prairie

Chihuahuan desert

Cross-Timbers savanna-woodland

Eastern Canadian Forest-Boreal transition

Eastern Great Lakes lowland forests

Edwards Plateau savanna

Gulf of St. Lawrence lowland forests

A fast, suckering native shrub of streambanks and moist thickets across eastern North America, grown for huge flat-topped cymes of tiny lemon-scented white flowers in early summer and the clusters of dark elderberry drupes that follow. Spreads by root suckers into naturalized colonies 5 to 12 feet tall and wide; the flowers feed butterflies and the showy fruit feeds birds. The raw berries are not eaten fresh - they are cooked into jelly, pie, and wine.

Climate notes

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Native to eastern North America. The Wildflower Center summarises the range as New Brunswick to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, south to Florida and Texas, and Wikipedia gives the same envelope from southwestern Quebec and Ontario to northern Florida and eastern Texas. The habitat is consistent across sources and narrow in character: upland and mesic mixed woods, thickets, bluffs and ravines. This is an understorey plant of dry-ish hardwood forest, not a wetland or streamside shrub, which separates it cleanly from possumhaw viburnum in this same group.

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Range provenance, stated plainly. The POWO taxon page resolved the accepted name but returned HTTP 403 for its distribution rows, as it did for most of this batch, so the WGSRPD codes mapped above came from World Checklist of Vascular Plants data served through GBIF - the same Kew dataset reached by a different route. Only native rows were kept. No introduced rows were returned for this species, which is worth saying: unlike several plants in this catalog, mapleleaf viburnum has no naturalised footprint outside its home range to report.

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The two range layers on this record agree exactly, which is worth stating because on most records in this catalog they do not. The Kew rows carry 33 botanical countries and the Wildflower Center per-state list carries the same 33 subdivisions - 29 US states, the District of Columbia, and New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec - with no entry present in one layer and missing from the other. Nothing on this map is a reconciliation call.

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Hardiness is one of the few places the sources disagree. Missouri Botanical Garden prints Zone 3 to 8 and this record carries that span; Wikipedia gives 4 to 8. A gardener in zone 3 should know that the colder end rests on a single source, and that the plant is in any case a forest-floor shrub whose winter exposure is buffered by canopy and snow in the northern part of its range. The warm end at zone 8 is where the native range genuinely stops, in northern Florida and eastern Texas.

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Dry shade is the site this plant is FOR, and it is the reason to choose it over anything else in this group. Missouri Botanical Garden states it is generally more shade tolerant than many of the other species of Viburnum and that established plants have some drought tolerance; the Wildflower Center rates drought tolerance HIGH, accepts full shade, and lists dry rocky soils among its soil types. Very few flowering shrubs will hold a dry root-filled bed under a mature oak or maple. The honest trade is that flowering and fruiting both fall away as shade deepens, so a plant in genuine full shade is a foliage plant with an autumn colour payoff and very little else.

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Soil chemistry is a real constraint here rather than a preference. The Wildflower Center gives acidic soil below about pH 6.8 and Wikipedia narrows the preference to 5.0 to 6.5 with tolerance up to 7.5. On limey or heavily amended alkaline ground this is the wrong viburnum, and blackhaw viburnum, which the same catalog records as far more adaptable across soils, is the better choice.

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The suckering is climate-independent and constant across the range, and it should be read as a design property rather than a defect. The Wildflower Center says the species suckers profusely to form large, loose, open colonies, and Missouri Botanical Garden says plants will naturalize by suckering to form colonies if suckers are not removed. In a woodland planting that behaviour is the product being purchased: a low self-renewing understorey layer that closes bare ground where turf and most perennials cannot grow. Against a mown edge or in a tidy border it is a permanent annual chore.

Similar plants

Browse lateral options with similar roles, light needs, size, or native-range overlap; these are not filtered for a better climate fit.

Sambucus canadensis

American elderberry

A native evergreen shrub of the eastern North American Appalachian + Piedmont understory producing extraordinary spring clusters of pink-to-white cup-shaped flowers with a unique spring-loaded pollination mechanism (anthers held under tension, triggered by visiting pollinators). State flower of Connecticut + Pennsylvania. Critically: NC State explicitly flags Kalmia as having HIGH-SEVERITY poison characteristics - all plant parts toxic to humans, dogs, cats, horses, and livestock; even honey from mountain-laurel nectar can poison humans ("mad honey").

Two things to settle before anything else. First, the name: this catalog already carries a plant called Possumhaw, and it is a holly, Ilex decidua. They are unrelated, they want different ground, and only one of them is this shrub. Missouri Botanical Garden files this species under smooth witherod and mentions possumhaw viburnum second, which is the safer name to buy under. Second, the ground: this is the wet-soil viburnum. MBG rates it medium to wet water, lists wet soil as its one tolerance and rain garden among its two suggested uses, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center puts it in savannas, low wet woods and bogs on wet, mucky, acid soils. That is the axis that separates it from its relatives here. Mapleleaf viburnum is the dry-shade suckering understorey shrub, nannyberry is the tall small tree of upland edges, and possumhaw viburnum is the one you plant where water sits. What you get for the wet feet is the best fruit display in the group and one of the best of any native shrub. The ovoid berries do not simply ripen, they run a colour sequence - light pink, then deep pink, then blue, then purplish black - and because a cluster ripens unevenly, deep pink and blue-purple berries commonly sit in the same cyme in late summer against glossy dark green leaves that follow with maroon to red-purple fall colour. The catch is that the display depends on pollination. MBG says outright to plant shrubs in groups rather than as single specimens for best cross-pollination and subsequent fruit display, so a lone plant is the one way to get all of the shrub and none of the reason for it.

A native deciduous holly of eastern North America grown for brilliant red berries that persist on bare stems through fall and winter - feeds songbirds and small mammals when little else is producing. Dioecious: one male pollinizer is required within 50 feet for every 10-20 female plants.

An upright, multi-stemmed, rhizomatous deciduous shrub of the western U.S. and Canada, named for its showy, fragrant yellow-to-orange spring flowers. Glossy lobed leaves turn reddish-purple in fall, and the spring bloom gives way to edible black currants by mid to late summer. Tough and adaptable - it tolerates dry to seasonally flooded soils, poor and clay soils, drought, and erosion, and the flowers and fruit feed hummingbirds, butterflies, and birds.

Creeping cotoneaster is a deciduous spreading shrub native to the mountains of central and southwestern China, Nepal, and Taiwan, prized for its distinctive flat herringbone branching, tiny pink-white summer flowers, and masses of vivid red autumn berries that sustain birds through winter. It holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit and tolerates poor, dry soils on banks and walls where little else will perform. The honest catch is twofold: the berries are mildly toxic to humans and pets (cyanogenic seeds, GI-irritant flesh), and the plant self-seeds freely enough that it is naturalising widely in the UK and Ireland and is considered potentially invasive - a real concern before planting near wild margins or hedgerows.

Cotoneaster horizontalis

Creeping Cotoneaster