Ilex coriacea

Ilex coriacea, the large gallberry, is a tall evergreen holly of the Southern wetlands, close kin to the familiar inkberry but built on a bigger scale, with broader, leathery, dark green leaves and larger fruit. On female plants the berries ripen to a shining black, a quiet contrast to the glossy foliage through fall and winter.

The epithet coriacea means leathery, for those thick, durable leaves, but the plant is better known to some by another common name, sweet gallberry, and to beekeepers most of all. Gallberry flowers pour out nectar, and the pale, mild, slow-to-crystallize honey they yield is among the most prized in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas, a regional treasure built entirely on these unassuming white spring blooms.

In the wild large gallberry belongs to the wet, acid soils of the Southeastern Coastal Plain, from Virginia to Texas, where the shrub often grows alongside the related inkberry holly, Ilex glabra, in baygalls, pocosins, and low pinelands. The larger leaves and larger berries set the two apart, and both thrive where the ground stays damp and sour.

Seldom seen in gardens, large gallberry rewards a spot with moist, acidic soil and a little care: mulch the roots and keep the plant watered, and the shrub settles into an easy, dense evergreen for a pond margin, a rain garden, a wildlife border, or an informal screen. The spring flowers feed bees, the black fall fruit feeds birds, and a female set near a pollinator will carry the fullest crop. Pair the shrub with inkberry, sweetbay, and swamp azalea in the same damp company.