I'm Matthew Pottage and Im the curator here at RHS Garden Wisley. I'm in the wall garden
east and I want to share with you some of our hollies and ivies. Holly and ivy is something we
hear about a lot during the winter especially the festive period but they are two very very useful
evergreen plants for the garde. The importance with evergreens is when you look out the window in
the depths of winter the garden looks like there's still something happening there's still some
some presence some warmth some vibrancy and both hollies and ivies are brilliant for that.
So hollies, or known as ilex, ilex aquifolia mostly are a very very useful plant, tolerant of both
shade and dry conditions. You will however get the best fruiting hollies if they're in full sun and
while hollies can take quite shady conditions they'll always have less foliage on it with
slightly more sparse but in a sunnier or brighter position they'll be much more fully furnished.
The plant behind me here, 'Argentea Marginata' is a classic variegated holly very beautiful creamy
yellow margin to the leaf and as you can see here at Wisley we've trained it as a standard and one
of the beauties of hollies is you can shape them not really something i'd ever take the shears to
more the secateurs just to form some kind of dome, standard or lollipop or even a hedge but
the downside of using them for hedging is they are slightly slower growing than some hedging
plants so it is something if you have a good soil you will have a quicker growing plant if you have
a poor soil expect to feed it to encourage the growth to reach the final house you want
At Wisley we treat these standards with a once a year cut and it's simply done
by secateurs just taking them back to a leaf joint so you don't leave untidy stems
you could go over this with a hedge cutter or pair of shears but the problem would be
a lot of the leaves would get cut in half and it wouldn't give such a crisp finish
but the beauty of holly being fairly slow growing is you only really need to do this once a year and
you can do this in late summer or if the plant has a lot of fruit on it and you obviously don't want
to be cutting off the berries, wait till the birds take the fruit or wait till Christmas
comes and then you can snip bits off for your wreath or some decorations, but you can clip
them or cut them back into the winter months the growth won't commence until the following spring
One of the many useful attributes of variegated hollies is they are good for
lighting up a shadier space. So this border at Wisley actually faces north, so not everything
is going to be happy in here but something like this variegated hedgehog holly, this
is one called 'Ferox Argentea' really lights up the space but also has these incredible prickles
on the leaves, these small spines on the upper surface of the leaves giving it the common name
of the hedgehog holly and if you're interested in textual form, interesting foliage it's absolutely
beautiful and it's really worth looking out for. but there are so many leaf forms, sizes and shapes
and color tones within the holly group, they're really addictive once you start looking into them
i'm standing in front of Ilex × altaclerensis 'Belgica Aurea' it's quite a mouthful isn't it
hollies do make small trees eventually if left unpruned and left completely to their own devices
this is a very old example and it is a slow growing cultivar
but it is a real highlight this time of year and you can see the fruit starting to form on it
Interestingly we often get asked why isn't there any berries on my holly, why isn't it fruiting
and hollies often are male and female and a mix will give you a better fruiting display
and it is just worth looking at male and female cultivar names you can find them
easily on the RHS website online and sometimes the name is not always helpful for example
ilex 'Golden King' is actually a female holly and if you can have a few in the garden
that are a mix of male and female that will definitely give you a better fruiting display
A really exciting hybrid holly is this cultivar called chestnut leaf
which is a cross between ilex aquifolium with latifolia, which is a very large leafed holly
what's really exciting about the hybrid is it's quite vigorous so it's quite a strong grower
and it has this lovely big leaf a little bit like a sweet chestnut hence the name
and it has very generous harvests of fruit, these are often born on the current season's
growth so you have these tips absolutely laden with fruits which ripen to a lovely scallop red
but it's a very appealing holly and if you're not really into variegated foliage
it's perhaps one to look out for but it will make a small tree in favorable conditions
Ivies or Hedera are brilliant for growing again shady dark dank places on walls
and in the wall garden east here at Wisley we have this gallery of different cultivars
that run along the entire length of this large wall and you can compare side by side different
leaf shapes sizes forms and colours. You can grow of course ivies on house walls
and an RHS scientific study has shown that they actually help keep the house temperature cooler
in the summer and warmer in the winter so they do have other benefits other than just looking pretty
Of course the obvious thing to mention here is pruning on ivies once a year take them away from
the gutter stop them growing over the windows and if they start to grow outwards just run a
hedge cutter or a pair of hedging shears over them just to stop them growing out too much
Obviously after bird nesting season because birds love to nest in ivy and it's brilliant nectar
source for things like butterflies and pollinating insects so it's a great plant for wildlife too
one of my all-time favorites is one called sulphur heart you can see it here with this
soft buttery yellow variegation, a lovely large leaf and it just looks brilliant year-round
A slightly more surprising and unusual way to grow an ivy is as a freestanding
standard and this ivy here has been trained on this pole
many years of hard work and this will have a once a year clip to keep the shape
and it's almost like topiaried ivy. You may have seen some of these plants at our flower shows
over the years they were generously donated to Wisley by Fibrex Nurseries in Warwickshire.
If you are only gardening containers or you have a shady area with pots ivies are
brilliant in containers too. This is one called 'goldchild' which is so bright and so vibrant
regular food and water will of course keep it looking its best
like any containerized plant and if vine weevil are visited to your garden
do do a nematode drench in august time because vine weavil will do unfortunately go for ivy in
pots, but apart from that very low maintenance and an incredible display 12 months of the year
So if you're thinking well, I don't have a lot of space I don't have the wall space for an ivy
perhaps think again. This is one of the smallest of the ivies, it's a variety called 'Spetchley'
and it's absolutely beautiful, cute, compact rather slow growing but grows absolutely flat to the wall
you can see how this is even following the contours of the wall here, again happy in a really
shady dark spot, such a beautiful texture it almost looks like moss on the wall from a distance.
I think both hollis and ivies are such worthwhile garden plants so I think regardless of your size
of garden or aspect or soil type there's surely a holly or an ivy to suit any space.