In the shade of deep woods, they tend to be smaller, slenderer and more open in habit than in sun. Preferring moist, well-drained soil, they tolerate the typical summer dryness of my woods where the available moisture is sucked up by trees.
They do not transplant easily, according to Dirr. He says this is because of the coarsely fibrous root system. Well, I have pulled and dug many of these plants and have not found a fibrous root system on any of them. Small seedlings can be pulled - with great effort - from moist soil. Larger plants have two or three big main roots that spread far. If you can sever them, you can remove the stump. If you cut the stems off at ground level, they will re-sprout for years. They are not really fast growing plants, but sprouting stumps will put up a couple feet of growth in a season.
Flowering occurs in very early spring - March in my USDA zone 7 garden.
Actually, it never really dawned on me that the early greening I saw on these plants were flowers.
For some reason, I never investigated closely - perhaps inclement weather or general spring hysteria. From a distance, I just thought they were leafing out.
The flowers aren't exactly flamboyant, as this close-up shows, but now that I know what they are, I mean to inspect them next spring. Some references say that they're fragrant.
In addition to fall color, spicebushes produce a half inch (1.26 cm) long red berry-like drupe that is favored by birds (especially wood thrushes). The shrubs are also host plants for the tiger and spicebush swallowtail butterflies.
Dried, ground berries have been used as a substitute for allspice.
A close-up of a drupe cluster.
As you can see from the previous image, drupes are formed either singly, in pairs or in clusters.
Inside each berry is a single, large, hard, light violet brown flecked with darker brown seed, almost as large as the berry. Since these shrubs are dioecious, only females produce fruit.
Seed needs a warm stratification period of about a month at 77ºF (25ºC), followed by three months chilling between 34ºF and 41ºF (1.1º C - 5º C). Sow them in peat or sand. Seed should be sown fresh and not allowed to dry out for best results, according to Wyman. Dirr says that if you sow in sand and chill at 41ºF (5º C) they will require 105 days of chilling. He also says that cuttings of half-ripe wood will root, but in very low percentages; he has had only the occasional cutting root.
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