A Reversal of Fortunes

Carissa holly that once was in center of planting has reverted to the original, a dwarf Chinese holly. This has obviously been underway for years. Images clickable for larger views.

Ask any risk taker in the stock market. Ask cryptocurrency moguls. Fortunes come and fortunes go.

It happens in horticulture as well Some plant selections aren’t made of stable lines and they soon make it known.

I see this happening frequently with Carissa hollies. They start out great with just the lone spine at the ends of their twigs, but then a dwarf Chinese holly breaks out. Obviously, that’s their mama.

In his great book Hollies, the late and gracious Fred Galle listed Carissa as having been found as a bud mutation in Wight Wholesale Nursery’s plantings of dwarf Chinese hollies. It was registered by the Holly Society of America in April 1972, and it has gone on to become one of the most-used dwarf hollies ever.

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But every once in a while, it will revert to its lineage, and you’ll see a branch of prickly leaves mixed in with a plant of single-spined foliage. Eventually the dwarf Chinese holly growth will overtake the Carissa. It’s stronger. That’s what has happened to the plant in my photo. That’s why they make long-handled lopping shears – so you can reach into the prickles and prune out the reverting dwarf Chinese holly before it overtakes all the Carissa around it.

This was sent to our Q&A section of e-gardens several years ago. This reader had been hit with a double dose. His variegated privet had reverted to green, as had his golden euonymus.

The same thing will happen to golden euonymus. It reverts to solid green. And variegated privet. And, more recently, Sunshine ligustrum.

You can already see the green euonymus overtaking the colorful golden euonymus. This is what happens when a variegated form reverts to its green mama.

When this starts to happen your only way of dealing with it is to prune out the reverse-mutant wood with lopping shears before it has a chance to grow and become dominant. Cut back into the variegated growth.

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Given even a year or two it will probably be too late. By then it will usually have caused the “good” growth to have become overtaken and misshapen, making it much harder to salvage the original look that you wanted.

Your takeaway? Get out the loppers and get rid of the odd stuff.

Posted by Neil Sperry
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