Photo Of The Week: Winterberry, Ilex verticillata, A Native Deciduous Holly
Starting to think about Christmas decor. A couple of weeks ago I was visiting relatives in the U.P., which is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the part of Michigan that is sandwiched between Wisconsin’s northern border and the southern shore of Lake Superior. I was driving home after a visit with my sister, and there was a lot of forest in this sparsely populated area of the state. Fall color was mostly gone except for the tamaracks–deciduous needle bearing trees with gold fall color that grow in swampy areas. Color now was mostly green spruces, white-barked birch trees, and brown grasses. As I passed a low area, I saw a flash of red color. I wasn’t sure what it was initially, but eventually I worked out that it must have been a winterberry, Ilex verticillata, a native deciduous holly. I came upon a few more and stopped to take photos.
We always had nice cut winterberry branches for sale at Christmas at Behnke’s, harvested from garden plants. They grow very well in the Washington, DC, area, as long as you have soil that stays on the moist side. Winterberry plants come as either male or female. The females produce the red berries, the males just hang out, being studly. To get berries, you need a compatible male that blooms at the same time as the females in the yard. For more, see this information from Proven Winners
Hi Larry:
I really enjoy your blog posts. They are always informative. I wonder if you could diagnose what ails my winterberries. They were planted by a local nursery in fall 2022. Last fall there were a few berries on two of the three females. This year there are none. Could they be suffering from the drought the last two years. This year, the flowers may have emerged and been ruined by the time I had gotten back from a conference in late May. I watered the plants pretty often after that. Do you think it was too late? Should I think about soaker hoses in that area?
Thanks!
Thanks for your kind comments. I’ll throw out a guess.
First, I will assume that you have compatible male and female plants that will flower at the same time.
It’s not unlikely that the plants were shaped while still in pots in the nursery, that is pruned, to make them more full, sometime in the late spring of 2022. This is routine for shrubs in the production phase. This would have removed the older growth which might have flowered that year, plus the resultant berries.
Then, your shrubs went into the ground fall of 2022. They did some rooting out into the soil, which continued into the spring of 2023, and put out some new growth. I think your shrubs were focused more on vegetative growth, that is, getting established with a good root system and leaves to support it, and weren’t thinking about sex. That is, they weren’t physiologically inclined to produce a lot of flowers.
Going forward, I think it’s just a matter of the plants becoming established and fuller. Don’t do a lot of pruning. If they did get quite dry as you describe, it is possible that it would cause some of the berries to abort and drop, but I think it’s really just a matter of being patient.