Ruscus aculeatus "Wheeler's Variety"

Ruscus aculeatus 'Wheeler's Variety' is a low, self-fruiting selection of Butcher's Broom, and the whole point of the plant is written into that phrase. The wild species is dioecious, needing a male and a female to set fruit, but 'Wheeler's Variety' is a hermaphroditic clone that carries perfect flowers and so ripens a heavy crop of scarlet berries entirely alone, with no partner required. For a gardener who wants the winter show from a single plant, this is the form to grow.

Like the species, 'Wheeler's Variety' belongs to the asparagus family and comes from the woodlands of southern Europe and the Mediterranean. The glossy, spine-tipped structures that look like leaves are in fact flattened stems, called cladodes, that do the work of leaves while the true leaves shrink to tiny scales. Small off-white flowers open from the very center of each cladode in spring, and by autumn the marble-sized red berries follow in the same place, sitting on the face of the flattened stem in a way that never quite stops surprising. The name Butcher's Broom recalls the wiry stems once tied into stiff brushes for scouring butchers' blocks, and the Latin aculeatus means prickled, for the sharp cladode tips.

The plant shares the long European medicinal history of the species. The rhizome and root were valued for centuries in the treatment of venous and circulatory complaints, and later research isolated the steroidal saponins ruscogenin and neoruscogenin as the active compounds behind that tradition. Those details are set out in the medicinal fields below.

In the garden 'Wheeler's Variety' earns a place in the hardest ground: dry shade beneath trees, a shaded path edge, a north-facing foundation, or a low evergreen groundcover in a woodland bed where softer plants give up. Slow-growing, long-lived, drought-tolerant once settled, and left alone by deer, the plant asks almost nothing and returns a reliable flush of red berries every winter, all from one self-sufficient shrub.