Nature Pick: Snowberry and Snowflakes

The snowberry, or Symphoricarpos albus, is a shrub and member of the Honeysuckle family.

Snowberry can be found in well over half of the fifty states as well as in many parts of Canada. In Lincoln, snowberry can be found around town and throughout Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild. Snowberry is a native plant and is a forage plant for livestock as well as bighorn sheep, according to the Forest Service Fire Effects Information System.

Snowberry shrubs can be easily mistaken for huckleberry bushes, but a quick way to tell them apart, even in the winter, is to look at the branches. Snowberry leaves grow directly opposite one another, so that two leaves branch out from a single node. In huckleberry bushes, the leaves grow alternating, with each leaf having its own node.

Snowberry usually blooms with small white or pinkish flowers from mid May to July, according to the United States Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service. It grows well in swampy thickets and along stream banks as well as in open forests, and it thrives in heavy clay soils.

Some sources note that the berries are inedible and mildly toxic. The berries are known to foam up and were used as soap by Native Americans and as a skin treatment for burns and rashes, according to the USDA. Additionally, the twigs were sometimes hollowed out to make pipe stems.

Snowberry bushes are so named because the round white berries resemble snowballs.

Snowflakes

Real snowballs are composed of compressed snowflakes, and while you wait for snowberry bushes to resume growth next spring, you might take a moment to examine the snowflakes around you this winter.

Snowflakes commonly form with six "arms" or sides and are symmetrical. This is caused by a combination of complex factors that also explain why individual snowflakes all tend to look unique, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"A snowflake begins to form when an extremely cold water droplet freezes onto a pollen or dust particle in the sky. This creates an ice crystal," according to the NOAA. As the snowflake falls rom the sky, water vapor attaches itself to this original crystal, freezing into a six-sided crystalline and symmetrical pattern.

The temperature of the air where the the crystal forms determines the crystal's shape, meaning needle-like crystals form at 23 degrees Fahrenheit and plate-like crystals form at five degrees Fahrenheit. As the snowflake falls and temperatures change, the crystal structure may branch in varying directions, while still keeping its six-sided shape. Because all snowflakes take a slightly different path to the ground, they will form slightly differently and look unique because of the various conditions they encounter on the way down.

The first known photographs of snowflakes were taken Jan. 15, 1885 by Wilson Bentley, according to the Jericho Historical Society. Bentley was a farmer and self-taught scientist who grew up as a farmer in the "Snowbelt" area of Jericho, Vt., where 10 feet of snow fell annually.

Bentley connected a camera to a microscope to obtain photographs of snowflakes, pioneering a technique now called "photomicgrography," or the photographing of small objects.

"Bentley stood in the winter cold for hours at a time; waiting patiently until he caught falling flakes. Once a snowflake landed, he carefully handled it with a feather to place it under the lens. The apparatus was set up outside so that the delicate specimens would not melt, and after a minute and a half exposure, he captured the image of a snowflake," states an article about Bentley from the SIA.

In 1931, Bentley worked with a physicist from the United States Weather Bureau named William J. Humphreys to publish a book entitled "Snow Crystals," which included 2,300 of Bentley's snowflake photographs. Over his lifetime, Bentley took more than 5,000 photographs of snowflakes.

"The snow crystals ... come to us not only to reveal the wondrous beauty of the minute in nature but to teach us that all earthly beauty is transient and must soon fade away. But though the beauty of the snow is evanescent, like the beauties of the autumn, as of the evening sky, it fades but to come again." - William Bentley, 1904, The Christian Herald