Ilex glabra ‘Nigra’

Ilex glabra 'Nigra' is the inkberry chosen for good looks in every season, a compact, rounded evergreen holly with unusually rich, dark green leaves. Where the wild inkberry can bronze and dull through a hard winter, this selection was picked to hold a deeper, cleaner green, and the smooth, spineless foliage stays handsome on a tidy frame that runs lower and denser than the run of the species.

The species is one of the great native broadleaf evergreens of the East. Ilex glabra, inkberry or gallberry, grows through the sandy, acid soils of the coastal plain from Nova Scotia to Florida and west to the Gulf, in wet pinelands and bog edges. The epithet glabra means smooth, for the neat, unarmed leaves, and 'Nigra', black or dark, names both the deep foliage and, on female plants, the small black berries that give inkberry the common name.

'Nigra' has earned a place. The horticulturist Michael Dirr, who has spent decades searching for better inkberries, judged this clone about the best in his Georgia trials, praising the dark, persistent foliage and the compact habit. Those are exactly the traits that turn a useful native into a garden staple: color that holds, a shape that stays full, and the toughness inkberry brings from the wild bogs.

Neat and evergreen to the base, 'Nigra' works as a low clipped or informal hedge, a foundation planting, a massing, or a dark green backdrop for perennials, and takes shearing without complaint. Give the roots moist, acidic soil in sun to part shade, and pair the shrub with azaleas, camellias, sweetbay, and native ferns in the same acid company. For berries, set a male inkberry nearby; the spring flowers feed bees either way.