Ilex pedunculosa (female)

Ilex pedunculosa is the holly that fools people, an evergreen with smooth, spineless, glossy leaves closer to mountain laurel than to any prickly Christmas holly. The real signature comes in fall, when bright red berries hang from slender stalks an inch or two long, dangling below the branches like tiny cherries, a detail no other cultivated holly quite matches and the source of both the botanical name and the common one, longstalk holly.

The epithet pedunculosa points straight to those long peduncles, the stalks from which the fruit depends, and the trait is worth the name. Native to central and southern China, Taiwan, and Japan, this small evergreen tree is also among the very hardiest of the broadleaf evergreen hollies, holding the glossy leaves and setting fruit as far north as USDA zone five, where most evergreen hollies will not grow at all.

That combination of cold-hardiness, clean spineless foliage, and cherry-like fruit has won admirers, chief among them the horticulturist Michael Dirr, who wrote that longstalk holly should be used more than it is, that the tree is apparently not well known, and that to him it is the most handsome of the evergreen hollies that can be grown in northern gardens. High praise, and deserved, for a plant still hard to find in the trade.

As a female, this longstalk holly needs a male within range to set the long-stalked red berries, which birds relish and deer tend to leave alone. Slow and refined, the plant makes a quietly distinctive specimen, a screen, or an evergreen anchor for a border in sun or part shade and moist, well-drained soil. Give the tree room to show the hanging fruit, and pair the roots with rhododendron, mountain laurel, and other acid-loving evergreens.