The Evergreen of the North American Woods

Wintergreen, Gaultheria procumbens, is a low creeping evergreen shrublet of the acid woodlands of eastern North America, bearing white bell-flowers, scarlet berries and glossy aromatic leaves that persist through winter, the trait that names it. Native peoples of the region gathered its leaves for a fragrant tea and chewed them, and the settlers took up the same uses; it is also called checkerberry and teaberry. Its evergreen endurance through the snow gave it, like holly and ivy in Europe, a quiet association with life persisting through the dead of the year.

Its flavour became one of the defining tastes of North American confectionery: wintergreen was a standard flavouring for chewing gum, hard candy and soda well before synthetic methyl salicylate made the flavour cheap to reproduce, and the taste remains far more familiar in the United States and Canada than in Britain, where the same compound is known mainly from muscle liniment, a genuine transatlantic split in how one plant chemical came to be read as either a sweet or a medicine. The plant also readily colonises recently burned or logged acid woodland, one of the first low shrubs to return, so that a patch of wintergreen can itself be a quiet sign of a forest's slow recovery.