Crush a leaf and the whole plant declares itself, spicy and balsamic. The bayberries and wax myrtles fix their own nitrogen and thrive on poor coastal sand, their waxy berries once boiled down for fragrant candles.
The bayberry candle is one of those traditions so old it has become purely symbolic, burned at Christmas for luck, the scent faint and slightly waxy and unlike anything paraffin has managed to replicate in three centuries of trying. Most people who burn one have no idea what plant produced it, or that the plant is still out there, growing in sandy pocosins and coastal flats from New Jersey to the Gulf, doing quiet work in the margins of the southeastern landscape. That plant is Morella caroliniensis.
Morella pumila is the dwarf waxmyrtle, a low, native evergreen that keeps everything gardeners love about the common wax myrtle, aromatic foliage, waxy berries, and a tough constitution, and shrinks it all to knee height. Native to the frequently burned pinelands of the southern United States, the plant is an adaptation to that fiery world, staying small and spreading slowly into dense patches and colonies by underground runners.
Morella pumila 'Willow Leaf' is a distinctive, fine-leaved form of the native dwarf waxmyrtle, selected for narrow, elongated, willow-like leaves that give the low shrub an unusually elegant, airy texture rarely seen in the species. Like the wild plant, this is a low, spreading, colony-forming evergreen of the fire-adapted pinelands of the southeastern United States, once listed as Myrica pusilla and now placed in the genus Morella.
Southern wax myrtle is one of the hardest-working native evergreens of the Southeast, and 'Emperor' is a nursery selection of that adaptable shrub. Fast-growing and densely branched, wax myrtle forms a large evergreen shrub or a small multi-trunked tree, clothed in narrow, olive-green leaves that release a clean, spicy, bayberry scent when crushed. The plant thrives where many shrubs fail, from wet ground to dry sand, in sun or shade, on the coast or inland. Our propagation material comes from Hopelands Gardens, a few minutes from the nursery here in Aiken, where a grand old specimen still leans at the angle Helene left in 2024, root plate heaved half out of the ground and better than half the trunk buried. The tree has carried on growing from that new posture without missing a season, in a garden that lost old pines, deodar cedars and magnolias outright, which says more about the constitution of wax myrtle than any list of virtues could.
Southern wax myrtle, long known as Myrica cerifera and now often placed in the genus Morella, is one of the most useful evergreens of the Southeast, a fast, aromatic large shrub or small tree of the coastal plain. 'Luray' is a male clone selected in Hampton County, South Carolina, by the plantsman Bob McCartney for a notably dense habit and a compact, semi-dwarf form. Brush the olive-green leaves and a clean, resinous, bay-like scent rises, the same fragrance that gives the tribe the old names wax myrtle and bayberry.
Myrica rubra, the Chinese bayberry or yangmei, is a fruiting evergreen tree from the misty mountains of East Asia, revered for centuries across China and Japan for tangy-sweet berries and an elegant, shapely form. Imagine cherries and cranberries with a botanical lovechild that had the moodiness of a plum and the antioxidant punch of a superfruit, and something close to yangmei would be the result. The plants we grow are female, tissue-cultured clones of a named selection.
