Vaccinium crassifolium 'Well's Delight'

The creeping blueberry is the ground-hugging cousin of the fruiting kinds, a low, evergreen, native groundcover of the Carolina coastal plain that trades height for reach. 'Well's Delight' is a North Carolina State University selection from the southeastern corner of that state, named for the late Dr. B.W. Wells, the pioneering North Carolina ecologist, and set apart by small, shiny leaves even finer than the usual for the species. The botanical name crassifolium means thick-leaved, for the firm little evergreen leaves that line the trailing stems.

Rather than a fruit crop, this is a plant grown for cover and texture: a dense, glossy, dark green mat that turns bronze and burgundy through winter cold. Small, white to pink, bell-shaped flowers stud the mat in spring, feeding early bees, and are followed by small dark blue berries that the birds take, edible enough for a passing nibble though never the harvest of a true blueberry bush.

In the wild, creeping blueberry runs along the moist, sandy, acid ground of the Carolina coastal plain, where the water table sits high or a slow seepage keeps the soil damp, though the roots never sit in flood. That preference makes the plant a natural evergreen groundcover for a sandy bank, the front of an acid border, a pond-edge slope, or a native and pollinator planting, knitting slowly into a fine, weed-smothering carpet.

Give 'Well's Delight' full sun to light shade and the moist, sandy, acid soil the plant favors, and the mat fills in steadily with almost no care. Pair the groundcover with blueberries, pieris, native azaleas, and other acid-loving companions, and let a drift carry the ground where turf or a coarser cover would look heavy. A quiet, refined native that does a great deal of work for a plant so close to the soil.