Seeds and cuttings I collect around North Carolina, what they turned out to be, and how to grow them for a NC Piedmont native-plant nursery.
Morella cerifera · Myricaceae
Crush a leaf and you have it. Waxy gray fruit is on the wood right now.
Community photos of Morella cerifera to study before I head out: leaf, flower or bract, ripe fruit, bark, whole plant.
Weakley rates the NC Piedmont rare and the Coastal Plain common, and notes it is now widely planted in the Piedmont and persists or naturalises in suburban woodlands. iNat holds 3 records for Person County, 2 for Granville and 0 for Caswell, against 197 for Durham, 169 for Orange, 54 for Chatham and 24 for Alamance — but Orange and Durham hold zero herbarium vouchers across 211 GBIF records.
Best bet: Cuttings. 87% rooted untreated and 97% at 1,000 ppm IBA. For seed the wax must come off first, then 90 days at 5 °C.
Native, but Weakley rates the Piedmont rare and much of what grows here was planted. Takes anything from swamp edge to dry xeric upland, full sun to dry shade, acid soil. Cautions: zone 7 is the cold limit and Roxboro sits at 7b with lows of 5–10 °F, and NC Extension rates the foliage high to extreme flammability. It suckers into sizable colonies.
Each look-alike with the one character that settles it. Tap a photo to zoom.
The closest leaf match here — alternate, evergreen, leathery, with several teeth near the apex and an entire margin below. No resin glands and no aroma. Fruit is a jet-black pea-sized drupe on a stalk, Sep–Nov, not waxy gray fruit packed sessile along the stem.
Leaves only about 1.5 in and crenate right around the margin rather than toothed at the apex alone, and not aromatic. Translucent red quarter-inch drupes persisting into winter. Widely planted in Piedmont yards.
Evergreen, alternate, glossy, everywhere in Piedmont landscaping, and crushed foliage genuinely is aromatic — but maraschino cherry, not resin, and the margins are entire. Fruit a black drupe. **High-severity poison: stems, leaves and seeds carry cyanogenic glycosides.**
Leaves opposite, which ends it at a glance, and small, thin and unscented. Blue-black berries in dense panicles. Invasive here, so do not move cuttings or fruit around.
The other strongly aromatic shrub in wet Piedmont woods, but deciduous with entire thin leaves and no resin glands. Red drupes in fall, and the aroma is citrus-spice rather than resinous.
Evergreen, alternate and leathery, but margins entire and the underside silvery-white with orange pubescence along the midvein. Coastal Plain only, so it should not turn up around Roxboro.
The silvery peltate scales on the leaf underside read like glands in bad light, but they are scales rather than resin dots and the leaf is not aromatic. Both invasive.
Narrow alternate leaves at the same pond and ditch margins, but deciduous, finely serrate the whole length, thin rather than leathery, and unscented.
This is the rare one where the fruit window is open the day I write this. Weakley-aligned NCSU gives flowering as April and fruiting August through October, so late August is inside it.
Habitat is wet ground first: pocosin, marsh and swamp edges, ditch banks, pond margins, the slack water side of a stream. Around Roxboro that means the lake shorelines and the farm ponds and roadside ditches rather than a hardwood slope. It also grows on dry sandy uplands, which is unusual for something that also sits in a swamp, so the habitat filter is looser than most.
The catch at this latitude is how thin it gets, and I had this softer than it should be at first. NCSU's toolbox lists the species as occurring in the Piedmont and Coastal Plain, which is an occurrence list rather than an abundance rating. Weakley breaks it down by province and rates the NC Piedmont rare against the Coastal Plain common, and says outright that it is now widely planted in the Piedmont and persists or naturalises in suburban woodlands.
The counts fit that. Statewide iNat holds 3,927 observations, but the county numbers fall off hard going north: Durham 197, Orange 169, Chatham 54, Alamance 24, then Granville 2, Person 3, Caswell 0. All three Person County records are roadside or residential, on Thaxton Road in Roxboro and off Thorncrest Drive in Timberlake. The strongest single line of evidence is that Orange and Durham, with 366 iNat records between them, hold zero herbarium vouchers across 211 GBIF records. Botanists have not collected it because there is nothing wild there to collect.
Crush a leaf. That is the whole identification, and it works in any month. Strongly aromatic, resinous and sweet, the bayberry-candle smell. Almost nothing else in a Piedmont wet edge smells like that.
Then the resin glands, tiny yellow dots that want a lens or hard sidelight. I had this wrong at first and wrote underside only. In M. cerifera the glands sit densely on both surfaces. Dense below and nearly absent above is M. caroliniensis, so checking the underside alone keys to the wrong species. Aroma plus glands on both faces plus apex teeth is what I should be confirming.
Leaves alternate, evergreen, narrowly obovate to oblanceolate, leathery and glossy. Weakley gives 4–9 cm on fertile branches. NCSU's 3–6 in is probably measuring vigorous shoots. Under an inch wide either way. Teeth are confined to the apex; the lower half of the margin is entire. Bark gray-brown to nearly white, thin and smooth. The plant is multi-stemmed and fast, to 20–25 ft tall by 8–10 ft wide, and it suckers into sizable colonies, so I should expect a thicket rather than an individual.
Fruit is the reason to go now: sessile clusters of 2–6 waxy blue-gray drupes packed directly on the previous season's wood, not on this year's growth and not on stalks. The wax coating is what makes them look dusted pale gray-blue.
It is dioecious, which matters for planning. Half the plants never carry a single fruit, and NCSU is explicit that good berry production usually needs both sexes present. Male catkins are about an inch, yellowish-green, in April. So a seed trip means checking each thicket for fruit before committing, and April is the trip that sorts the males.
The genuinely close one is inkberry. Ilex glabra is alternate, evergreen, leathery, and has several teeth near the apex with an entire margin below, which is the same leaf recipe. It has no resin glands and no aroma, and its fruit is a jet-black pea-sized drupe on a stalk in September through November rather than waxy gray fruit sitting sessile along the stem. Crushing a leaf settles it in a second.
Yaupon is the other holly to expect, mostly as landscaping. Leaves only about an inch and a half, crenate right around the margin instead of toothed only at the tip, not aromatic, with translucent red quarter-inch drupes into winter.
The one to be careful about is Carolina cherry laurel, because it breaks the aroma test. Prunus caroliniana is evergreen, alternate, glossy, planted all over the Piedmont as a hedge, and its crushed foliage genuinely smells — of maraschino cherry rather than resin. Margins are entire and the fruit is a black drupe. NC Extension rates it high-severity poison: stems, leaves and seeds carry cyanogenic glycosides. So aroma alone is not sufficient. Aroma plus apex teeth plus yellow glands is.
Chinese privet ends at a glance because its leaves are opposite, and it is invasive, so nothing of it should be moved. Spicebush is the other strongly aromatic wet-woods shrub but it is deciduous with thin entire leaves and a citrus-spice smell. Swamp bay is evergreen and leathery but entire-margined with a silvery-white underside and orange hairs on the midvein, and it is a Coastal Plain plant that should not appear here. Autumn olive and thorny olive have silvery scales on the leaf underside that can read as glands in poor light — scales, not resin dots, and no smell. Black willow shares the pond margin and the narrow alternate leaves but is deciduous, finely serrate the whole length, and thin rather than leathery.
September or October per LBJ, which sits inside the August-to-October fruiting window, so there is room to go now and again later.
The wax is the whole gate. That gray coating is water-repellent, and stratification barely works while the wax is still on — Fordham's trial, reported through the Woody Plant Seed Manual, puts numbers on it.
| Treatment | Germination |
|---|---|
| No stratification, wax on | 6% |
| Stratified 90 d at 5 °C, wax on | 17% |
| Wax removed, no stratification | 6% |
| Wax removed and stratified | reported significant, figure not published |
So both steps, in that order. WPSM gives removal as abrasion against a screen or a warm water soak, and LBJ adds a lye solution at a teaspoon to the gallon. Screen abrasion is what I would try first. Nothing to buy, no caustic to handle. Then about 90 days moist at 5 °C, which lines up with LBJ's 60–90 days at 34–41 °F, or sow outdoors in fall and let the winter do it.
Storage runs the other way. Fordham advises holding the drupes intact until sowing so the seed does not desiccate, while Dirr and Heuser say strip the wax before long dry storage at 1–3 °C. So collect whole and de-wax at sowing, unless the seed is going into the fridge for a year.
Cuttings look like the better route regardless. Blazich and Bonaminio at NC State got 87% rooting untreated and 97% at 1,000 ppm IBA, taking wood at the softwood to semi-hardwood transition. Root cuttings 2–3 in long in early winter are the other option. Since local material is planted, cuttings off a known wild plant further south beat seed off a roadside shrub of unknown origin.
One planning note. A grow-out block raised from seed comes out roughly half male, and those never fruit. Fine for screening or nitrogen fixation, a problem if the goal is berries for birds.
Around Roxboro, honestly, expect planted material. The three Person County records are all along residential roads. Worth stopping at if I pass one, because handling a known plant is the fastest way to learn the smell and the gland pattern, and worthless as wild provenance.
For real populations, go south and east. Density climbs the whole way into the Coastal Plain, where it is a dominant in interdune swales and pocosins. Falls Lake and the lower Eno and Neuse margins are the nearest places it should be behaving as a wild plant rather than a hedge.
Grow-out is easy and undemanding. Full sun to dry shade, acid soil, wet swampy ground through to dry xeric upland, fast growth. It fixes nitrogen too: Myricaceae carry root nodules with symbiotic Frankia, and FEIS says the rate exceeds legumes. The only inoculation figures I found are for M. pensylvanica, a different species — inoculated one-year plants at 35.38 g above-ground against 10.10 g for controls, 14.76 g against 5.04 g below. No M. cerifera trial turned up, so inoculation is untested here.
Three cautions. Zone 7 is the published cold limit, Person County is 7b with lows of 5–10 °F, and FEIS notes the species favours elevations below 500 ft while Roxboro sits around 600 to 700. That reads to me like real winter risk at the northern edge, though I found no sourced report of inland winter kill, so call it my inference. NC Extension rates the foliage high to extreme flammability because of those same aromatic compounds, with an explicit warning against planting inside defensible space. And it suckers into colonies, a virtue for a screen and a nuisance in a bed.