Oh by gosh by golly - part 1

So this year my wife and I made a couple of trips out of state, one trip to West Virginia to spread my father-in-law’s ashes at a family cemetery, the other trip to Georgia for my cousin’s wedding. In both locations we scavenged Holly berries to see if I could get them to germinate.

The Holly berries from West Virginia came from a tree which I believe to be an example of a well established (and native) Ilex montana, while the berries from Atlanta Georgia came from bushes surrounding a hotel and were clearly planted as part of the landscaping. Thankfully I took a picture of that one:

Between the shape of the leaves, the location, and the height/size/growth habit of the pant I’m convinced that this is Ilex Cornuta “Needlepoint”

Now, in case you aren’t already aware members of the Ilex genus frequently have some extremely specific cold stratification requirements which can make the process of getting their seeds to germinate somewhat time consuming. Well maybe time consuming isn’t exactly correct, this is more of a set-it-and-forget-it type of process that just happens to take awhile to get anywhere that looks like progress is being made. Specifically speaking they generally require either a long stint of cold stratification or sometimes even multiple cold stratification sessions, each lasting months, which is a tad unusual but not insurmountable.

For those wondering: Cold Stratification is the process of subjecting your seeds to cold temperatures and sometimes a low amount of moisture for (generally) weeks at a time as part of the germination process. Many plants don’t require cold stratification, but an example of a common one that does is Lavender. I also cold stratify Catnip, though I’m not actually sure that this is required for Catnip to germinate.

So, I decided to attempt to germinate these Holly berries. The first part of that process is to separate the seeds within the each collected berry which is recommended to do while the berries are still fresh, so of course I didn’t find that part out until well after the berries had dried.

Already this is going well.

Undeterred I just threw the collected berries into a couple of glasses of water to rehydrate them a bit, and checked on them periodically until I could start squishing the seeds apart from each other which took about three days of soaking in total. This process worked… okay(ish) but wasn’t precise or all that effective so if you attempt this same process do yourself a favor and just extract the berries before the seeds dry out. I took the squished berries and the still hard casings that were present and just piled each variety on a paper towel which was on a paper plate, then left that to air dry for another few days.

This is what I had afterwards for the holly berries from Atlanta Georgia, I took the picture after separating the seeds from the detritus that was left over:

If even three of these germinate I’ll have one too many

The number of seeds I was able to get from the tree from West Virginia was much smaller, as were the seeds, and that’s the one my wife actually cares about. While that combination of factors isn’t great the good thing at least is that variety can grow here in northwest Ohio without too much coddling. The variety from Atlanta is right on the cusp of pushing our hardiness zone (6B) which does matter since it’s a perennial, so that one will maybe need some help to make it through the winter here.

When it was all done, this is what I was able to collect of the West Virginian variety:

A much more meager offering

Next up is the cold stratification process. The berries have been bagged and placed on our breezeway for the winter. I may decide to place a small lightly moistened strip of paper towel in each of these bags just to provide that bit of moisture that they might need. I’ll post a part two later letting you know if this worked.