Photo: Krzysztof Ziarnek, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped · Wikimedia Commons

Evergreen Bayberry

Morella caroliniensis

Also called southern bayberry, swamp bayberry, Myrica heterophylla, Myrica caroliniensis.

A colony-forming bayberry of southern bogs and swamps, with spicy-scented leaves and gray-white waxy fruit that feeds birds through the winter.

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Saplings ship bare-root or in a pot, usually 12 to 18 inches tall, in the dormant season, and their height and age are stated here with the price, once available.

We grow it as saplings and seed. One email when it is listed with prices, and nothing else. Or ask, and we reply with what is ready now. Live plants ship February to May and October to November.

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Wildlife valueHedge or screenTolerates wet soilNitrogen fixing

Type: Shrub
Mature height: 8–12 ft
USDA zones: 6–9
Growth rate: Medium
Flowers: April to June
Fruit: Berries, August to February
First crop: 3 to 4 years
Mature spread: 15 ft
Sun: Full, Part
Soil moisture: Average, Wet
Grows wild in: Stream banks, sandy barrens, swamps and wet flats
Native range: 16 states, north to New York, south to Florida and west to Texas
List all 16
Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia
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Evergreen bayberry is the southern counterpart of our northern bayberry. Its leathery leaves smell spicy when crushed, and female plants carry small fruits coated in gray to white wax. Without fruit the two bayberries are hard to tell apart. Its young fruit is smooth where northern bayberry's is fuzzy, and some botanists treat the two as one species. Maryland lists it as threatened. Grow it as a screen or hedge on wet, acid ground, where its waxy fruit feeds wintering birds.

Size, growth and what to expect

No source rates its growth, so our growth estimator treats it as a medium grower, like our northern bayberry, about a foot and a half a year. It makes a shrub or small tree 8 to 12 feet tall, now and then 20, and root sprouts spread it into thickets 4 to 15 feet wide. Its leathery leaves run 1 to 5 inches long and stay on through winter or drop late in the season.

Small catkins open from April to June, the males and females on separate plants. On female plants the round fruits, under a quarter inch across and coated in gray to white wax, ripen from late summer into fall. They hang on into winter, when yellow-rumped warblers and other birds eat them, and the plant hosts the red-banded hairstreak butterfly.

It grows wild on the coastal plain from New Jersey and Pennsylvania south to Florida and west to Texas and Arkansas. Its home is bogs, swamps, stream and pond margins, wet pine flatwoods near pitcher-plant bogs and moist woods.

How to grow Evergreen Bayberry

Evergreen bayberry grows in full sun or part shade, in a moist to wet, acid soil of sand or peat. It takes ground that floods now and then, but not salt spray or salt water. Set plants 6 feet apart for a screen and keep them 7 feet from a wall, since root sprouts widen the clump. At its size it can go within 15 feet of overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant them in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper. Set the crown at the soil line, put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the stems. Bayberry seed will not sprout through its wax, so rub the wax off on a screen or soak it off in warm water. Sow cleaned seed outdoors in late fall under mulch, and seedlings come up in spring. For a spring sowing, keep it damp in the refrigerator for 90 days first.

Water weekly through the first two summers unless the ground stays wet. Like other bayberries, its roots host bacteria that fix nitrogen, so skip fertilizer.

Plants are male or female, and only females bear the waxy fruit, so plant three or more seedlings for a male and a female. The wood is somewhat brittle, but a plant cut to the ground grows back from the roots.

Heights and zones are typical ranges for the species in cultivation; local conditions and seed source shift them.

Sources (7)