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Introduction
The evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum Pursh) is an important ornamental plant in northwestern United States landscapes. The native range of this species extends along the Pacific coast from central California north through Oregon and Washington, USA into British Columbia, Canada (1,5). While an excellent ornamental, Vaccinium ovatum has recently been planted in Oregon's Willamette Valley for commercial fruit production. Although this may seem like a new crop for Oregon, commercial production, at least on a small scale, has a long history in this region.
Saving the Evergreen Huckleberry
In 1918 Frank Moll, a Portland, Oregon office worker left his job and set out to save the evergreen huckleberry from extinction. Moll and his wife found the perfect valley for a homestead about 15 miles from the Pacific Ocean, at the base of Pioneer Mountain near Toledo, Oregon. They constructed a sturdy log cabin and Frank began exploring the Oregon coastal mountains, sampling wild huckleberry plants from the California border to the north edge of Lincoln County. Those plants with the largest and best tasting berries were collected and transplanted to the Moll homestead. After visiting Moll in the mid 1920s, Frances Twining wrote in a Portland newspaper article "The house is of logs, hewn from the very site where it stands; and massed in with other shrubs and in long rows in the nursery were the particular specimens of the Pacific coast huckleberry that we had come to see (4)."
During the early 20th century, florists around the United States found the attractive evergreen shoots of this Vaccinium species to be an exotic addition to cut flower arrangements. Entrepreneurs in western Oregon gathered or purchased wild-collected shoots and shipped them by the train-car load to buyers across the country, as far east as New York (3, 6). Moll was concerned that the indiscriminate gathering of 10-15 year old huckleberry stems could not be sustained, and he invested considerable effort in learning to propagate and cultivate V. ovatum plants for their foliage and landscape use as well as for their fruit. In a Sunset Magazine article he wrote in 1933, Moll warned that the increasing demand for foliage would be met with a decreasing supply due not only to the wholesale harvesting of the...