Castle Wall Blue Holly (Ilex x meservae ‘Heckenstar’)

Your home is your castle, so you will certainly want to protect your keep! Why not include a living fortification fit for a king? An impressive broad-leaved evergreen shrub, the Castle Wall® has that clean, iconic leaf shape. Your Castle Wall® Holly (Ilex x meservae ‘Heckenstar’) is a Proven Winners® selection and lives up to the distinction with its exceptional foliage and hardy nature. It’s a newer, more compact variety of Holly with better branching, waxy leaves, and great pollinating ability!

Upright and elegant, the dark foliage looks handsome year-round! Plus spring brings tiny white blooms the bees will seek out. Scalloped and pointed foliage, that’s very glossy and highly ornamental and the foliage has the classic serrated, Holly-leaf shape. Sometimes referred to as a “Blue Holly” for its vibrant coloring! It really shines in the winter months!

Castle Wall® is an incredibly handsome male Holly and doesn’t have fruit or messy seeds, but it is a fantastic pollinator for its female counterpart, the Castle Spire® and Castle Keep® Blue Hollies! Just one is enough to pollinate several female plants. After all, what castle wall doesn’t have turrets and spires? Delightfully cold-hardy throughout USDA growing zones 5 to 7, growing 5-8 feet in height and only 3-4 feet in width!

Planting and Application:

Castle Wall® Holly is a broadleaf evergreen and its stout growth is fantastic for property definition. It would make an outstanding foundation plant! Plus it’s fast-growing, so before you know it you’ll have a large, vibrant shrub to provide year-round color for your landscape.

You could pair Castle Walls® with its female counterpart and enjoy the brilliant red berries on those female shrubs! With or without the female plant paired alongside it, Castle Wall® is fantastic for its decorative appeal and year-round green presence! Valued for its use as ornamental foliage in holiday arrangements, wreaths, and arrangements.

It has a compact and pyramidal form, so it’s ideal for hedges, groupings, and mass plantings. Create a living screen or even go one step further and create your own ‘living walls’ and garden rooms for outdoor privacy year-round.

It’s adaptable to a variety of soils and in fact, is a Holly that is likely to even thrive in boggy conditions. This makes them wonderful for along streams, Rain Gardens, and water features. Plant in low areas, moist wooded edges, and where your gutters drain!

• Compact Growth & Decorative Blue-Green Foliage
• Male Pollinator For Castle Spire®
• Pyramidal Fast-Growing Form
• Decorative Foliage For Holiday Décor & Arrangements
• Fantastic Hedges, Privacy, En Masse & Winter Interest

Tips for Care:

Blue Holly are long-lived, commonly thriving for 40 years or more. Keep yours looking amazing the whole time with these helpful tips:

Loving both full sun and part shade sites, Castle Wall® Holly needs well-drained soil with higher moisture availability. While being very cold-hardy, in the summer heat they will require regular watering, sometimes weekly, or more in extreme heat. Don’t let evergreens go into winter dry, provide winter watering when able. Holly prefers acidic soils and a generous layer of mulch helps retain soil moisture as well as insulate the root system from heat and chill.

Deer resistant, you don’t have to worry about anything coming around for a quick nibble. You don’t have to prune it, but you’ll certainly want to when the holidays roll around for home décor. Castle Wall® Holly prefers to avoid those drying winter winds, so it would love to be nestled close to your home, against a wall or fence, or protected by other evergreen trees and shrubs.

• Full Sun & Partial Shade
• Well-Drained Soil & Thrives In Wet Soil
• Moderate Moisture Needs
• Rarely Needs Pruning
• Long-Lived & Deer Resistant

No castle or home seems complete without the privacy and definition that living walls provide! So why not have the long-living, handsome evergreen fortification that Castle Wall® Blue Holly has to offer instead of cold stone?