Found in dry or moist acidic woods of eastern North America and south to cooler elevations in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, Wintergreen is a common evergreen ground-cover well-known for its fresh wintergreen smell when the leaves are crushed.

Growing only 6 inches tall, this creeper has dark, broadly-oval 1 inch leathery leaves that turn reddish in cold weather. It has solitary, nodding, white urn-shaped summer flowers that are followed by bright red 1/2 inch berries that may remain on the plant from late summer through the following spring.

Give Wintergreen good, organic, well-drained, acidic soil and shade. The better the soil, the more quickly it will spread. (Sunlight Gardens)

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This is the state herb of Maine.

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The generic name of Gaultheria was named after a Canadian botanist and physician of Dr. Gauthier of the 18th century. This Checkerberry Wintergreen or Teaberry is native to southeast Canada, New England down to coastal North Carolina to eastern Tennessee back up the Appalachians, and around the Great Lakes growing in acid soils of bogs, swamps, dunes, barrens, rocky slopes, and upland woods. Some are sold at many conventional nurseries in the eastern and midwestern USA in pots, grown over in the gentle climate of the Pacific Northwest at nurseries there, and some are also sold at native plant nurseries. It is one of those fussy plants that only grow well with a porous acid soil and a sheltered, shady location. I planted one in a tube with two dwarf Blueberry shrubs where I amended the potting soil with an acidifier mix from a commercial bag of sulfur & iron sulfate and had the pH about 5 to 6. My wintergreen died on me one severe winter when I should have covered it with burlap to shade it and some mulch to protect it better. I had it about 5 years. Beautiful, lovely broadleaf evergreen plant! Its waxy, white flowers are borne about mid-May to mid-August. It holds its red fruit that are really berry-like capsules from July to the next April. This species was the original source of oil of wintergreen used in liniments, and crushed leaves give off the fragrance. (There are about 170 species of Gaultheria in moist temperate regions and some mountain areas of the tropics all over the world, being evergreen shrubs.)

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