American beauty-berry

Callicarpa americana, the American beautyberry or French mulberry, is a deciduous shrub in the family Lamiaceae (formerly placed in Verbenaceae) native to the southeastern United States, from Maryland and Tennessee south to Florida and west to Texas and Oklahoma, with extension into Mexico, Cuba, and the Bahamas. It grows in moist deciduous and mixed pine woodlands, woodland clearings, river bottoms, and disturbed forest edges. The plant forms a loose open shrub 1-2.5 m tall, with arching branches and a slightly aromatic foliage. Leaves are opposite, ovate to elliptic-lanceolate, 8-20 cm long, with coarsely serrate margins, an acuminate apex, and a tapering base; the surface is dull green with a stellate-pubescent rusty underside and emits an aromatic terpene-rich scent when crushed (a feature noted historically by indigenous and settler populations as a mosquito-repellent). The flowers are borne in small dense cymose clusters in the leaf axils, each cluster about 1.5 cm across; individual flowers are 3-4 mm wide, with a pale pink to lavender four-lobed corolla and four exserted stamens. The diagnostic and ornamental feature is the fruit: tight globular axillary clusters of brilliant magenta-purple drupes, each 4-5 mm across, ripening in autumn and persisting after leaf-fall, with two pyrenes per drupe.