The last- named is our only native plant which is regularly picked and marketed for winter bouquets and Christmas decorations. Bittersweet is a woody twining vine commonly found along fence rows and forest edges. In fence rows it frequently grows in dense masses with two or more long stems closely twisted about each other into a living rope. Along forest edges and hawthorn thickets, the vines climb to the top of trees 30 feet in height. When snows were deep and game scarce, they gathered the vines and made a thick soup, rather unpalatable, from the inner bark.
Some vines have only male flowers and are barren.
Others have both male and female flowers and bear clusters of fruit which mature in late autumn and, during winter, provide food for birds. They are conspicuous because each fruit is a bright orange capsule which bursts open to expose a crimson berry-like center. Bunches of twisted branchlets, loaded with fruit, are very decorative and the plant is disappearing in many places because of the ruthless methods of market pickers. The common Burning Bush or Wahoo is a shrub or, rarely, a small tree as much as 25 feet tall, found along stream banks and wooded floodplains. Unlike bittersweet, the Wahoo has leaves in opposite pairs along the 4-angled twigs.