Early this spring a client asked me to plant our Nellie Stevens Holly trees to form a privacy screen at his place in Oxford, Maryland. Wow!! Oxford, Maryland, home of the original Nellie Stevens Holly, is where ~ 100 years ago, gardener Nellie R. Stevens experimented with holly cross-breeding and cultivated a new variety that carries her name today. Finally, a bucket list trip to witness the birthplace of the original hybrid cross Nellie Stevens Holly. During the past 40 years, we have planted over 11,000 hollies on properties in the Washington /Baltimore metro area.
The Nellie Stevens holly makes an excellent evergreen privacy screen as a living fence. They are sustainable biomass filters for the air we breathe, and birds welcome the habitat. A trip to the home of the original Nellie Steven’s garden is sort of a gardener pilgrimage. After completing our job, I then walked over to see the original home of the Nellie Stevens Holly. Great fun for a plant nerd who has, over time from cuttings, grown 11,000 + hollies and planted them as living fences for privacy screening across the metro areas. It’s sort of like my work isn’t a job, it is an adventure.
Hollies/ IIex have been widespread since near the end of the Cretaceous period, based on fossil records. Many varieties went extinct by the Pleistocene era. Imagine, this family of trees were around when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Wow! New varieties continue to be cultivated by gardeners to this day.
Our website has the current pricing and sizes available for the Nellie Stevens hollies that we grow locally on our tree farm in Damascus, Maryland.
Pictures of the home where it all started, 100 years ago.
