Excellent post Skip909. Thank you.

And yet in my locale I dont recall seeing barberries in the "wild".

The feral barberries that I see in northern Virginia forests have green foliage. The thorns and general shape of the shrub scream barberry so they are noticeable.

These are sterile. No danger of spread.

Thank you Sara.

I wonder why I am having a hard time sourcing this barberry here in Ontario Canada.

Many examples I see here are having a problem maintaining a columnar shape. If you do an image search you can find plenty of photos showing the same issue. There are also web sites that talk about it fruiting, but I don't know how solid their information is. That is if they are really using information known to apply to 'Orange Rocket' specifically or if they are misapplying canned remarks about Berberis thunbergii in general.

Unfortunately the patent description says nothing about any fruiting of this cultivar one way or the other:

patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=PP18411.PN.&OS=PN/PP18411&RS=PN/PP18411

Yes, not as columnar as advertised but definitely grows taller than wide :-) I find the coloring very appealing however, and have used it a lot in design work.

Not all J. barberries produce fruit or seeds in significant numbers. APHIS has done an analysis on various popular cultivars - some are copious seed producers and others produce very few, if any. There are also a few sterile cultivars of J. barberry on the market but Orange Rocket is not one of them. And more continue to be developed. However, sterile or not, one is unlikely to find these plants available in Canada....read this for an explanation why.

The two I saw earlier in June on my friends property were desirably narrow.

Anyways I heard back from my nursery contact and as you linked 'gg', he said it is not available here because it is a secondary host for wheat rust.

Which is exactly what that link pointed out.

('gg', if you read my post I did give you credit ;))

What is interesting is that my state - Washington - is one of the top five wheat producing states in the country. And yet Japanese barberries are not restricted in their sales here at all!! And neither are they considered invasive or even freely seeding here. Perhaps it is also a climate related issue with respect to the rust as it is with the self-seeding.........

And yet Japanese barberries are not restricted in their sales here at all!!

Canada is more risk averse? ;)

(My friend who has several specimens had said she got it from another gardener. It would make sense that somehow he brought it across the border surreptitiously.)

Very interesting. Thank you. A friend persuaded me to pull out a well grown older crimson pygmy. I still miss it. There is no adequate substitute. physocarpus doesn't even come close

IDK about being more risk adverse :-) Since agriculture is a primary industry here, one would think that factors that would adversely impact this industry - like wheat rust, for instance - would be very closely monitored and controlled if they came into play at all. The negative impact on agriculture does account for a large majority of our noxious weed/invasive species listing.......but no mention or notation on barberries at all.

Without knowing anything else it seems to me that USDA doesn't believe that barberries have anything to do with the transmission of "wheat rust" whereas Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada does(did) and so it seems that Canada is (still) erring on the side of caution.

There is a USDA-APHIS process for getting barberry approved for sales.

This was very educational. I have read over and over again about how invasive barberries are, yet even though I frequently hike in wooded or Prairie areas, I have never seen one growing wild. Perhaps zone 5 is too cold for them to reseed.

The varieties with heaviest seed set have been banned in Minnesota so there must be some evidence it can reseed in zones 3-4.

Also in the PNW and have many varieties including Orange Rocket over the last 40 years I have never had any seedlings. The longer I garden, the more I recognize a plant’s response to even small variations to climate and site. And of course, this is all changing before our very eyes with climate change.

Thanks for initiating the thread, Rouge. It is an interesting one.

Never seen any seedlings from any of my Berberis cultivars over 20+ years, even in areas where I overhead water. And many have berries.

Barberry seeds with unfortunate enthusiasm here, and unfortunately, the farmer next door uses management practices that encourage its growth.