Winterberry livens season's bleak landscape

By Rebecca Burcher Jones
Correspondent

Growing alongside a drab barrier on Interstate 64 near a Newport News exit ramp that I frequent are a half dozen winterberry hollies.

Most of the year I can't spot them among the roadside vegetation as I speed past, but come winter there's no missing these native shrubs because the clusters of red berries they bear blaze like beacons.

The berries are especially showy now because this shrub, Ilex verticillata, and many named cultivars are deciduous, meaning they drop their leaves in winter.

This allows the berries to garner all the attention against a backdrop of dense, gray-brown branches.

To get a close-up look at winterberry hollies and their berries, visit Norfolk Botanical Garden, where there are several planted right along the paved pathway on the far side of the WOW Children's Garden.

The local collection includes named cultivars, among them Bonfire, Harvest Red and Chrysocarpa, which produces a yellow fruit instead of the more common red and red-orange hues.

The 1/4-inch berries begin to take on color in September, but smooth, oval, dark-green leaves keep them hidden until the leaves turn yellow and drop off, about mid-October.

The berries last through winter or until they are eaten by birds and small mammals, including rabbits and deer. Tasty as the winterberry berries may be for wildlife, don't try them yourself.

Vickie Shufer, a local naturalist (whose book, "The Everything Guide to Foraging," will be published later this year), has sampled a few and reports they are quite bitter.

If enough are eaten, she said, they'll induce vomiting.

Winterberry grows as an upright, oval-shaped, multistemmed shrub. It has a tendency to sucker, and it's a gardener's choice whether to leave the suckers or prune them away.

Certainly, winterberry isn't pruned along an interstate highway, so allowing them to grow naturally is the easy alternative.

Winterberry is native to eastern wetlands that span north-south from Nova Scotia to Florida and west to Missouri.

In the home garden, it will grow in full sun or part shade, and as its native habitat suggests, it can tolerate moist soil and even some flooding. It prefers its soil on the acidic side.

Depending on the variety, winterberry will grow to 3 to 15 feet tall. Two compact varieties are Red Sprite and Afterglow, a cultivar with berries lasting till spring. A larger variety, growing to 9 feet, that holds its fruit until spring is Winter Red.

The giant among cultivars, however, is Sparkleberry, which grows to 15 feet. According to The Washington Post, this variety resulted in the early 1960s when hybridizers at the U.S. National Arboretum crossed a Japanese species with the native shrub.

Important to know is that only female winterberry plants set fruit, and only when planted within 40 feet of a male plant.

The variety Jim Dandy pollinates Red Sprite and Afterglow; Southern Gentleman pollinates Sparkleberry, Winter Red, Winter Gold and Red Sprite; Apollo pollinates Sparkleberry; and - wouldn't you know it! - Rhett Butler pollinates Scarlett O'Hara.

Only one male plant is necessary for as many as five to 10 female plants.

Rebecca Burcher Jones,

rebeccaburcher@cox.net