Myrica cerifera 'Emperor'

Southern wax myrtle is one of the hardest-working native evergreens of the Southeast, and 'Emperor' is a nursery selection of that adaptable shrub. Fast-growing and densely branched, wax myrtle forms a large evergreen shrub or a small multi-trunked tree, clothed in narrow, olive-green leaves that release a clean, spicy, bayberry scent when crushed. The plant thrives where many shrubs fail, from wet ground to dry sand, in sun or shade, on the coast or inland.

Botanists file the species as Myrica cerifera, though many now move the plant to the genus Morella, and the epithet cerifera says the essential thing: wax-bearing. The names bayberry and candleberry come from the same trait. Like the rest of the family, wax myrtle fixes nitrogen through root partnerships with soil bacteria, which is why the shrub prospers in poor, sandy ground where other plants starve. Salt spray, wind, and coastal exposure trouble the plant very little.

Wax myrtle is dioecious, male and female flowers borne on separate plants, the flowers themselves small greenish catkins of no ornamental account. On female plants those catkins give way to tight clusters of small, blue-gray berries sheathed in fragrant wax, the wax that colonists once boiled and skimmed to pour bayberry candles. The berries are a winter mainstay for birds, the yellow-rumped or myrtle warbler most famously, which takes its very name from this plant. Whether a given selection fruits depends on whether the plant is female, worth confirming when berries are the goal.

There is old medicine here too: the astringent root bark of bayberry was a staple of early American and Eclectic practice, used for sore throats, colds, and digestive complaints, though the bark is tannin-rich and was never a casual remedy. In the garden, wax myrtle earns a place as a fast evergreen screen, an informal hedge, a coastal windbreak, or a limbed-up small specimen tree, largely untouched by deer and pests. One honest caution comes with the virtues: the aromatic foliage is oil-rich and flammable, so site the shrub away from the house in fire-prone country.