Ilex laevigata

Smooth winterberry is similar to the common winterberry, Ilex verticillata, but is much less common in cultivation, and the differences reward a close look. The finely toothed deciduous leaves are glossy above rather than dull, which gives the whole shrub a cleaner and lighter quality through the growing season. Female plants produce attractive red berries, larger and slightly more orange than those of common winterberry, ripening in autumn and eaten by birds. The habit is upright and open, ten to twelve feet in time on a narrow four to six foot frame, with smooth gray bark and a fine twiggy silhouette once the leaves drop.

Laevigata means smooth or polished, for those glossy leaves, and Ilex is borrowed from the classical Latin name of the Mediterranean holm oak, whose foliage the European holly happens to resemble. The species occurs in the Atlantic Coast states from southern Maine to South Carolina, possibly reaching Georgia, and is uncommon in the southern portion of the range. In the wild you find smooth winterberry in acid swamps and seepage areas, very often growing with Atlantic white cedar, Chamaecyparis thyoides, in a habitat that has itself been reduced to fragments across most of the coastal plain.

The plants we offer are unsexed seedlings of South Carolina provenance, shared with us by Mike Creel. That matters in two ways. Local provenance means stock adapted to southern heat rather than to a New England swamp, which is not a given with a species whose center of abundance lies well north of here. And unsexed means exactly what it says: hollies carry male and female flowers on separate plants, and there is no way to tell which you have until a seedling flowers, usually in its third or fourth year. Buy three or five if fruit is the goal, and you will very likely end up with both sexes and a good crop.

In cultivation, plant in acid sandy soil with adequate moisture. This is a wetland plant, entirely happy in ground that stays saturated, and it belongs at a pond edge, in a bog garden, along a ditch, or in the low wet corner where nothing else has thrived. Full sun to part shade; fruit set is heavier in sun. Alkaline soil brings on chlorosis quickly. Pair with Chamaecyparis thyoides if you want to reconstruct the wild association, or with Clethra alnifolia, Itea virginica, Cyrilla racemiflora, and Magnolia virginiana for a southern wet planting. This is a collector's and restorationist's holly rather than a landscape staple, and that is rather the point.