Distylium
Distylium myricoides
The evergreen the trade quietly swapped in as boxwood, holly and juniper each hit trouble: a layered, blue-green witch hazel cousin with tiny maroon winter flowers and no significant pests at all.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Blue-green · Green
- Flower color
- Purple and violet
- Sunlight
- Full sun to part shade
- Watering
- Moderate to establish, little after; takes wet feet and drought both
- Soil
- Adaptable: wet clay, drought, sun or part shade
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 6b–9b
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- at the last spring frost
- Plant spacing
- 4 ft 11 in
- In-row spacing
- 3 ft 11 in
- Between rows
- 6 ft 7 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody and fibrous
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 12–16 ft across, about 1.5–2× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 20 in of soil
A shallow woody framework with the fine feeding roots in the leaf litter above it. Those feeders are mostly under the outer half of the canopy rather than against the stem, which is where water and feed should go.
The habit is Distylium’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- When
- Not harvested. A light tidy after the late-winter flowers, if the layered shape needs anything.
- What to look for
- A stray shoot standing up out of the layered line, usually in midsummer.
- How to harvest
- Snip risers back inside the outline with hand pruners. It takes shearing without complaint, but the layered natural form is better than anything a hedge trimmer can impose.
- How often
- Minutes a year. Freedom from chores is what it was bred for.
- Storing the crop
- Nothing to store. The tiny maroon February flowers feed early bees and ask nothing back.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
A decade ago nobody had heard of it; now it anchors new commercial plantings across the South, because it solved the industry's problem: an evergreen foundation shrub with nothing that eats it, blights it or minds the drainage. The bees work its odd little February flowers.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com