Evergreen Huckleberry (Vaccinium Ovatum) in the South

[The Herb Swamp]

Has anyone tried growing the evergreen huckleberry in the shade in Florida? Any thoughts on this?

[islander]

I don't think they will do well there. The fruit is ok'ish. They prefer a mild climate that is cool. Try growing Arctostaphylus or maybe Arbutus unedo instead.

[Francis_Eric]

I was just reading or more likely previewing a part of a old book from 1988 on page 28 (see link under quote )

Note a cross from V. racemosum , and V. ovatum was made before
Vaccinium racemosum  is in The Dominica Republic 500 to 1000 metre

1988. The genus Vaccinium in North America



Vander Kloet and Hall (1981) have postulated that Vacciniumsect. Cyanococcus originated in South America, in spite of the factthat no member of the section occurs or has been known to occur onthat continent. Nevertheless, V. darrowii, an evergreen memberofsect. Cyanococcus, has been crossed successfully with the evergreenV. ouatum, which belongs to the largely South American sect.Pyxothamnus (Darrow and Camp 1945). Like sect. Cyanococcus, thissection has the inflorescences in racemes, the pedicel is articulatedwith the calyx, and the anthers rarely have awns or have very shortones. Sect. Cyanococcus differs in having berries that are pseudo10-loculed and twigs that are verrucose. Except for V. darrowii, V.myrsinites, and a few southern plants of V. corymbosum, sect.Cyanococcus is also deciduous, and therefore the leaves are rarely ascoriaceous as they are in sect. Pyxothamnus.
There are at present no members of Vaccinium sect. Cyanococcusgrowing on the isthmus between North and South America, inMexico, in southwestern America, along the Pacific coast of theUnited States, or in the Caribbean. Vander Kloet (1983a)nevertheless favors the Caribbean as a route to North America, forthe following reasons: the lowbush diploids are largely found ineastern North America (Fig. ; the Greater Antilles have suitablehabitats where several members of the Ericaceae occur includingV. racemosa (Stearn 1972); and the Caribbean is a set of islands wherethe "taxon cycle" is known to operate (Ricklefs and Cox 1972), a factthat accounts for the rapid rate of extinction of species there.


https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2014/aac-aafc/agrhist/A43-1828-1988-eng.pdf



This is a Older book They have found tropical Vaccinium species since In South America

[Francis_Eric]

The following evolutionary history for Vaccini u m 3ed
Cyanococcus is suggested The ancestral Cyanococcus lowbushprobably emigrated from South America to North America, using the
Proto Antilles (which later became the Greater Antilles) eppingstones As the North and South American continents drifted
wrest northwest at approximately 5 cm per year, the tongue of the
crustal plate, which lies between them and on which the GreaterAntilles were located, moved relatively eastward, bringing this chainof islands near Florida (Rosen 1975). During the Tertiary period,
Cyanococcus invaded the sand dunes, relict sand dunes, and pineflatwoods of peninsular Florida, where the evergreen and diploid
V. darrowii still thrives. At the periphery, populations divergedthrough parapatric speciation into sister groups. The trend has beento lose the evergreen and xeromorphic characters of the present-dayV. darrowii, such as small, thick, glaucous, inrolled leaves(glaucescence has been shown to retard transpiration; see Andersen et
al. 1979; Freeman et al. 1979), and to evolve more temperate deciduous plants with fewer xeromorphic characters, as in V. tenellum, or with larger leaf blades, as in V. pallidum. A concomitant decrease in
seed weight (Crouch and Vander Kloet 1980) and pollen size has also
been observed for the group. This reduction is most readily explainedby the fact that the lowbush diploids occurred on a continent that wasdrifting 50-60 km west-northwest every million years into a moretemperate or boreal climate, where the shorter season selectedagainst larger leaf blades, heavier seeds, and larger pollen grains.
Whether the speciation process described for Vaccinium sect.
Cyanococcus can be applied to the remaining sections of Vaccinium in
North America is moot. Camp, in his papers on the biosystematics ofVaccinium sect. Oxycoccus (1944) and sect. Euvaccinium (19426),presumed that they did, but evidence is scarce, especially for
Vaccinium sect. Myrtillus, where the basic diploids do not form a tidy
distributional cline of species like that shown in Fig. 8 for the lowbushdiploids of sect. Cyanococcus.