- Author: Patricia Matteson
This is about one of those “OMG—it's really true!” moments. I am a newbie Master Gardener who sometimes doesn't take gardeners' conventional wisdom seriously simply because it seems unlikely. I had heard for years that one might need both male and female holly plants to get berries. My English holly bush (Ilex aquifolium) flourished, flowered profusely, and produced a few berries every year--a very few, not enough to decorate with at Christmastime. Frustrating, but since there were always some berries, I figured that lack of a male plant was not the problem.
Two years ago, I reached the point of either replacing the holly--which by then had grown into an eight-foot tree—with something that would make better use of its scarce sunny spot in the garden or trying (in my mind) the Hail Mary option of ordering a male holly bush. Reluctant to rip out the lustrous dark green holly tree, I planted a little male bush about a yard away. The male is a different holly cultivar, the hybrid Ilex x meserveae “Blue Prince.” It has small, less elegantly-shaped leaves with spiny-toothed margins that resemble the serrated leaves of tanoak. The female tree towers over the male bush, which is only 1 ½ feet tall. Although the bloom of the male's tiny white flowers overlapped with the flowering of the big tree, it could hardly have looked less promising.
Wrong. By some miracle—invisible swarms of tiny pollinators? the perfect swirl of errant breezes?--the entire holly tree burst with red berries this winter, top to bottom and on all sides. I was able to make lush, beribboned holiday holly bunches for our front porch and to give away to neighbors. Now I look on the little male holly bush with respect and appreciation. His name is Mighty Mite.
This reminds me of my Dad. He had the most beautiful holly tree and every year in early December he would deliver holly boughs for my mantle.
He grew up on a farm and told me the reason his tree was abundant with berries.