Ilex verticillata 'Winter Gold'

Ilex verticillata is the winterberry, the native deciduous holly grown not for evergreen leaves but for the astonishing display that comes after they fall: bare gray stems packed end to end with bright fruit, lit up across the dead of winter. 'Winter Gold' plays that trick in an unexpected color, trading the usual fire-engine red for warm gold blushed with soft orange-pink, a glowing, gentler note against snow.

Winterberry belongs to the wet places of eastern North America, the swamp edges, pond margins, and damp thickets from Canada to the Gulf, and the finely toothed, spineless leaves look nothing like a Christmas holly until the flowers give the family away. The name verticillata, whorled, describes the way those small flowers and leaves cluster along the twigs. 'Winter Gold' arose as a sport of the famous red 'Winter Red', keeping the heavy crop but changing the color.

As with all winterberries, only female plants fruit, and only when a male of matching bloom time grows nearby. 'Winter Gold' flowers late, so a late-blooming male such as 'Apollo' or 'Southern Gentleman' is needed within about fifty feet, not the early 'Jim Dandy'. Get the timing right and one male will set a whole group of females heavy with berries; get it wrong and the branches stay bare.

Give 'Winter Gold' the moist to wet, acidic soil winterberry loves, in full sun to part shade, and let the shrub do what it does best: light a rain garden, a pond edge, a wet swale, or a mixed border through the coldest months. Songbirds strip the fruit in late winter, and a few cut branches of gold berries bring something rare to a holiday arrangement. Woodland settlers knew the plant as fever bush, a nod to the folk history behind this quietly spectacular native.