Whole Lotta Verticillata | The Ilex Chronicle

Our Red Ilex Verticillata in a beautiful vase from The Blacksmith Shop in Ferndale, CA.

One person at Sun Valley is absolutely obsessed with Ilex Verticillata. His name is Lane DeVries. I walked into Lane’s office last week and asked the foolish question,

“Why is our red ilex so special?”

Lane’s eyes popped open, he flipped the top down on his laptop, took off his Bluetooth and grinned a huge smile, like a cat that had new toy. 

  

“So, you want to know about our ilex program, aye?”

Little did I know Lane had been patiently waiting for someone to come ask him about our ilex so he could expound on all the interesting developments in the Sun Valley ilex program.

Lane inspecting the ilex, bush by bush.

The following is distilled down from a reeeaaaally long discussion about ilex verticillata.

The ilex we currently grow is the “Oosterwijk” variety, which is the female cultivar of the ilex plant. Our original plants came from Holland, and we have been growing it at our Willow Creek farm for about 10 years.

Over the course of the fall we have gold, orange and red berries come to harvest.  Now through Christmas we have the classic red coming on strong. We usually sell out about seven days before Christmas, so get your ducks in a row now, because this year Thanksgiving is coming later than usual, and December is going to be a mad dash.

Ilex berries in mid-August.

Our picking team harvests the branches, places them in white buckets and then they get hauled down the mountain to our Arcata farm. In the warehouse, we removing the leaves to expose the stunning red berries, bunch and sleeve the branches.

Over the last several years Lane has been propagating the bushes with the best floral characteristics.  He has been doing this in a couple ways. The first way is making cuttings, and reproducing identical genetic copies of the strongest plants. By “strongest” I mean the plants that lives up to a set of 30 characteristics which Lane has established.  Characteristics include berry color, amount of berries on stem, position of the berries on the stem and stem length.

Ilex!

The other way Lane is working to create the perfect ilex is by cross pollination. He will take two highly ranked bushes and plant them next to each other, so that the bees will cross pollinate the flowers, creating entirely new strains of ilex bushes.

Lane has the fields diagrammed like a huge theater, each plant has an assigned seat so it can we tracked and monitored over the years.

 

This diligent and a bit compulsive behavior is leading to a breakthrough in fall foliage that will benefit all floral professionals, and ultimately consumers that will enjoy these berries as part of their fall and holiday traditions.

Ilex in the warehouse, ready to be sleeved.

Of course the berries are the star of the show, but I actually like the branch itself just as much. The main stem is a warm brown with gray and maroon highlights, and the stems holding the berries have an olive green tone that very subtly sets off the red berries with a lovely contrast.  The laterals of the branch are pretty stiff, so design wise you need to be conscious of this. The branches are much more rigid than a rosehip branch, and if you use this to your advantage you can easily go vertical or horizontal.

The Queen of Greens, Debbie Hartman, about to make some beautiful arrangements featuring our ilex.

Sun Valley is your dependable ilex source, and with Lanes' work, it shows that we are in this for the long haul.  Breeding this bush to be the best floral product is a testament to the effort and devotion we share in bringing the best flowers and foliage to market.