Every Thanksgiving our family usually takes a road trip up the Taconic Parkway, and this time of year is incidentally the best to start playing a game called “Spot the Winterberry.” To play, train your eyes on a stretch of colorless roadway, especially in the edges of marshes, and be rewarded with the sight of sprays of red or orange berries. While you can certainly keep tabs of who spots this festive quarry first, seeing their jewel-like beauty almost on accident is its own reward.

Winterberry, or Ilex verticillata, is a native shrub in the holly family that tops out at around 15 feet. Its light green to white flowers emerge late spring to early summer, providing food for pollinators, and it bears a profusion of bright red or orange berries in the late fall, which are eaten by songbirds including bluebirds, robins, cardinals, cedar waxwings, catbirds, wood thrushes and mockingbirds over the course of the winter. To my mind, there is no better holiday yard decoration than a mature female winterberry–I will involuntarily smile when identifying them in the world in anticipation of what a gift it is to see them kitted out in their festive best. 

The end of Thanksgiving also means the advent of, well, the Advent. Time to begin the bizarre but lovely tradition of decking the inside of the halls with the outside, and vice versa! As a child, this meant that my mother and her friends would gather on the Sunday after Thanksgiving with greens foraged from their own yards and gardens for wreath making. Each one would spend an hour or two and come away with all the wreaths, swags, and garlands they needed to broadcast a holiday welcome for the long winter ahead. As I grew old enough to copy this tradition for my own home here, I curated my garden with evergreens to have a homegrown wreath-making stash! with a view to growing plants ideal for wreath-making!

For the amateur florist who relishes spending an hour wrangling former yard scraps into holiday greenery, the relative pointiness of different plants becomes a consideration. Enter winterberry: unlike its thorny-but-iconic cousin, American holly (Ilex opaca), winterberry loses its leaves in the fall, leaving the gem-like berries to stand out on their own. And if you want to build habitat with your landscaping, these berries actually get more palatable to birds as the winter goes on; freeze and thaw cycles improve their digestibility, postponing the availability of this food until a time when other sources are notably scarce.

How to Plant Winterberry

Winterberry are dioecious, which means that they have distinct sexes with the female needing to be pollinated by a male to produce fruit. For this reason, if you’re taking the commendable step of planting a winterberry, be sure to plant both a male and a female within a quarter acre of one another (many nurseries will price a pair together). Dwarf and standard species of winterberry are available, so you can choose between different varieties based on the size of your planting space. (For instance, the very popular dwarf cultivar “Berry Poppins” tops out at four feet).

Winterberry shrubs thrive in wet or even boggy conditions as long as they get partial to full sun and are planted in acidic soil (pH of 5.5 – 6.5). They don’t require regular fertilization, but you may make the soil more acidic with amendments like coffee grounds or conifer mulch. Once your shrub is established and producing berries, be sure to prune in the early spring before new growth to ensure the next season’s fruiting.

Plant winterberry seedlings in fall or spring in a place that gets at least six to eight hours of sunlight. Dig a hole twice the size of the root ball, mix up to one-third of displaced soil with compost, and water well. Put seedling in, and backfill, being careful not to cover the grown. Tamp well and water again, being sure to provide at least one inch of water a week in its first year of growth.

How To Make a Wreath from Landscaping Scraps

Consider pruning evergreen shrubs in your yard as long as they’re well established enough to weather the sudden subtraction in mass at the start of a demanding season (think a trim rather than a buzz cut). An armful of arbor vitae, andromeda, cedar or spruce can furnish enough material for at least a wreath, and calling on your friends and neighbors to donate for more variety is a great way to initiate holiday cheer!

Wreath forms can be obtained for free from cleared invasive vines or clothes hangers coaxed into a circular shape. Wire wreath forms are available for minimal cost at dollar and craft stores.

When making the wreath, use green floristry wire to wrap each two to four  foot bundle of greens, then secure in the back. It’s easier to use one long continuous piece of wire.

1. Using cleared invasive vines, create a wreath form (or use a wire hanger)

   

2. Use clippings from around the yard & trim to comparable lengths (2” – 4”)

   

3. Make a small bundle of trimmed greens and wire to wreath form

   

4. Repeat as needed, affixing winterberry if you have it!

   

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