Can anyone recommend a variety of serviceberry i can plant as a hedge. Requirements are low suckering, or only- very close to the plant suckering since it will be 10-12 feet from an asparagus bed. Zone 3/4. Anyone have a preferred variety they can recommend?
I don’t have a service berry but looked into buying one.
I believe it already is a bush form and has to be trained for a single trunk “tree”, so the plant itself might already give you what you want.
Nurseries sell them single trunk, but they shouldn’t stay that way.
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Id recommend getting a Canadensis if you can. They have a clumping habit, but dont root sucker much in my experience. They can also be readily trained to a single trunk, a rarity in the genus. Sasktoon (alnifolia) cultivars offered by most nurseries for their fruit bearing qualities tend to root sucker a lot. You could probably definitely keep that in check with mowing, fwiw. 10-12 ft is a long way for most of the suckering / stoloniferous types, unless you have shallow soil over impervious ledge or some such.
Beware that taxonomy for this genus is a total mess and nurseries are quite apt to misrepresent the actual species for various reasons.
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I kind of thought clumping and suckering are the same thing. I guess it depends on how far away the suckers come up. Or perhaps if you want it it’s clumping and if you don’t it’s suckering? Kind of like a flower is a flower unless you think of it as a weed.
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i think of clumping as being from the crown or immediate vicinity thereof. Stolons form away from the crown on lateral roots, which comprise a good portion of the root mass of those types. I have native stoloniferous ones here that send runners along fissures in the shaley bedrock and spring up sometimes 20 ft away. The soil in that area is less than 1 ft deep and the bushes are 15 ft tall, so not really surprising that they would do that
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