Winter Heath

Family: Ericaceae (Heather family)
Genus: Erica
Species: carnea

Photo taken by Audrey Fraggalosch, December 2004.

Sometimes plants of great beauty are so common we tend to take them for granted. I think that’s the case with Erica carnea, the winter heath that’s put on such a splendid show in Whatcom County this year. Actually, it performs well for us every year, in both commercial and residential settings, and surely that’s why it’s so widely planted here. Winter heath is as charming close up as it is at a distance. Take a look at those masses of small, bell-shaped flowers—characteristic of the Ericaceae family, which includes rhododendrons and kalmias—and then step back and appreciate the overall look of a plant that’s very well suited for our local growing conditions.

There are more than 200 cultivars of winter heath, with bloom times ranging from October to March. Erica carnea bloomed in John Van Miert’s yard in December, and other varieties are at their flowering peak in my garden now. A hard shearing when their blossoms fade will help the evergreen foliage stay tidy and set the stage for more pretty flowers to emerge next winter. Leave heath unsheared and it will brown up, turn twiggy, and lose its good looks. Shear it annually, right after bloom, and it will flourish and stay attractive for a decade or so.

Now is a good time to plant heath—there’s a good selection of small, healthy starts at garden centers this time of year—and to propagate it by ground layering. Just scrabble a place in the earth, scrape a little at the underside of a branch still attached to the plant, and anchor it by peg or rock so it stays in contact with the soil. Leave it be for a year while it roots, then clip the branch from the parent and carefully lift your new plant and settle it into its new home.

Give heath plenty of room to spread into ground-hugging, weed-discouraging mounds from 8 to 15 inches tall and up to 24 inches wide. Small starts will fill their spaces in about three years. Choose a place in full sun, where the soil is neutral to slightly acidic and drains very well. Without good drainage, heaths will perish quickly. Healthy heaths, once established, require very little supplemental watering in the summer. And they prefer poor soil. Don’t feed them much, if at all; let their performance be your guide. They’re quite tough, as plants go, so long as they’re given good drainage. In fact, “Erica” derives from a Greek word meaning “to break” and one explanation is that an infusion made from Erica leaves was effective at breaking up kidney stones. But another story is that the roots of Erica have been known to break rocks where they grow.

The species name carnea tells us the flowers are red; and in the first-named E. carnea, native to the Alps, the flowers were red and the foliage was deep green. Today, cultivars offer flower colors from deep red to pink to white, and foliage ranges from blue-green to yellow and silver. Growth habit is typically mounding but a few varieties have sparse, weeping branches just right for spilling over the top of a wall.

There are more than 700 species of Erica, and 90 percent of them are native to the Cape area of South Africa. The “extraordinary diversity of closely related species in a limited area is unparalleled anywhere in the world,” according to The Gardener’s Atlas. These Cape heaths were widely cultivated in Europe during the 1800s, but they died out during the First World War because not enough men were available to maintain the greenhouses where they grew. Cape heaths may enter our market again during the next decade; but in the meantime there are more than enough cultivars of E. carnea to keep us happy.

We might associate E. carnea with the British Isles but the plant famously abundant there is Calluna vulgaris, or heather—even though it, and the land it grows on, have been known as “heath” for centuries. Erica carnea is native to central Europe. That’s where a plant explorer found it and brought it to England in 1763. In the 1920s a lady from Scotland collected cuttings of an Erica carnea she found on a stroll through the Italian Alps. She cultivated them at her home. Today, E. carnea ‘Springwood’—named for her home—remains one of the most popular and widely grown heaths in the world. It has lately been joined in the top ten by ‘Springwood Pink.’ Both varieties produce a very heavy crop of flowers that hang on for months through the winter and into the spring.

There are plenty of other choices available now. Armed with the name of the one you have in mind, you’ll find just what you need to add easy-care, year-round beauty to your own home garden.