John Manley has spent the vast bulk of his 25 year-plus journalistic career with The Irish News. He has been the paper's Political Correspondent since 2012, having previously worked as a Business ...

Skimmia japonica, commonly called skimmia is a shade loving, evergreen plant that has a rounded growth habit. It can grow to 4 feet in height It has attractive clusters of flowers in the spring, but ...

This evergreen shrub that produces white flowers in May and June and bright red berries in the fall and winter. The female plant produces the berries when a separate male pollinizer plant is nearby.

In 1999, when I finished my Master Gardener training, I wanted to purchase two plants to celebrate the completion. I wanted these two plants to be something I had never grown before and ones that ...

The most common kind is Skimmia japonica. This species produces plants with pollen, which are male, and female plants that carry berries. A female plant will not carry berries until there is a pollen ...

FLOWERS: Fragrant white flower clusters in April; male flowers larger and more fragrant. FRUIT: Bright red fruit fall and winter. Japonica variety is dioecious (separate sexes), needing male and ...

It can be difficult to find a plant that looks good in the garden year-round — especially one that looks festive in December and produces sweet-smelling flowers in the spring. There is, in fact, a ...

Just to confuse matters: there is one skimmia, S. japonica subsp. reevesiana, that is self-fertile (monoecious) and therefore does the flower/berry business all by itself. POND MARGINALS Earlier this ...

I bought a Skimmia japonica early in the autumn and planted it in a half barrel container on my patio using the correct acid compost. By the early part of January the foliage was beginning to turn ...

At this time of year, the female plants of skimmia carry clusters of bright red berries. Strangely, birds do not take the berries, which last on the bush from their time of formation in late summer ...