By Linda Raedisch
For the past five years I have been in a happy relationship with a ten-foot-tall Ilex aquifolium. If you’re in the habit of receiving Christmas cards you won’t need me to describe him, for he’s a typical English holly. Both his height and fullness of his figure suggest he is a mature gentleman, though I would hesitate to call him old. As I write this in early September, he is busy producing clusters of pale green berries close to the bark of his outermost branches. I’m not really a holly expert, not when it comes to the botanical side of things, so I can’t swear that my beloved tree is actually a “he.” English hollies are dioecious, which is the Latinized Greek way of saying they’re divided into “two houses,” both alike in dignity, I’m sure. Since males and females produce both fruits and flowers, I have no idea if my particular holly is a Romeo or a Juliet. I do, however, hope he’s a stag holly, as horticulturists call the male species; with his tall stature and coat of glossy leaves he has all the look of a knight in shining armor.
Male or female, this year’s crop of berries proves that it has had sexual congress, through the bees, with another holly in the neighborhood. If it is, in fact, a male specimen, then my English gentleman is also a bit of a rascal, for one male holly can easily service five females, even if they’ve never met.
Did I mention he likes to host parties? Whenever I pass by, his densely packed limbs are aflutter with tufted titmice, black-capped chickadees, and “little brown jobs” as they like to call them in his native Britain.
According to the Highlanders of Scotland, grass will not grow beneath a holly tree because that is where the infamous Blue Hag of Winter keeps her walking staff, but I’m pretty sure it’s the white carpet of bird droppings that keeps the grass down. The birds don’t come to feast on the berries; it’s the dark, cavelike shelter of the boughs that attracts them. As for me, I simply enjoy the pleasure of his company.
I won’t give out my beau’s address because he’s not, strictly speaking, mine; he resides within the tastefully and painstakingly landscaped grounds of a condominium complex of which I, unfortunately, am not a resident. Has this stopped me from taking a few clippings to place among my advent candles in the waning days of autumn? Not exactly. I’m afraid the same goes for the blue-berried juniper from the office park, and any pinecone that catches my eye. Oh, the joys of the suburban jungle!
I pass the complex almost every other day on my walk into town, ogling the faux Colonial facades and brick chimneys, the network of slate paths punctuated by flowering plums, rose-begonias, and sprays of Russian sage. This quaint little village was originally built as a shopping district in the 1970s, and I suspect my valiant green knight has been there from the beginning. He would have been a much more slender chap in those days and only a few feet high, but already, I imagine, exuding Old World charm. The English holly is about as Old World as you can get. In fact, it still goes by something very close to its Anglo-Saxon name, holegn.
While the Ilex aquifolium is an immigrant, there are plenty of hollies native to the New World, and many of them thrive in my own northern New Jersey. Botanists have dubbed the American holly Ilex opaca, that is, “opaque,” because the leaves are not as shiny as those of its English cousins. But really, the American holly will do.
I recently came across a thoroughly respectable specimen at the woodsy end of my local arboretum. This one had the unpretentious charm of a Scandinavian Christmas tree with plenty of space between the branches for birds to perch and enjoy the view. Where Ilex aquifolium is jovial, Ilex opaca is guardedly merry.
My new acquaintance certainly seemed at home there in the shadow of the towering oaks, just as Ilex aquifolium would have been in the primeval forests of Europe. Though a little on the scrappy side, Ilex opaca is every inch a holly and would not look out of place in any December window display. The thickets of the Northeast have historically been a cheap source of seasonal greenery, especially in Pennsylvania where Christmas has never gone out of style. The impoverished residents of southern New Jersey have been known to scrape their way through the winter by setting up roadside stands and hawking pinecones and sprigs of holly gathered in the wilds of the Pine Barrens. Still, I would think twice or even three times before taking a cutting from this spindly fellow.
It was by the side of a dirt path leading to Winakung, the twentieth century recreation of a seventeenth century Lenape village, that I had my first significant encounter with a native holly. Winakung means “Place of Sassafras” in Lenape, but it was the not-very-hollylike shrub with the placard bearing the name “yaupon” that caught my interest. The yaupon holly’s Latin name is Ilex vomitoria, but that did not stop Native Americans from roasting and brewing the leaves into a caffeine-rich black tea. Later, English colonists used it to give a kick to their persimmon beer. (Just don’t drink too much or it will live up to its Latin name!) In the older literature, it is sometimes spelled japon, but it has nothing to do with Japan; the name means “little shrubby thing” in Catawba.
Yaupon tea played a role in the rituals of the Mississipian culture of the ninth to twelfth centuries when it was drunk from incised conch shells; Cherokee and Creek tribes use it as a sacrament to this day. The Catawba, Creek, and Cherokee are Southeastern tribes, as is the tribe of Ilex vomitoria, so what was my plucky little friend doing so far north? I must admit I have no idea. I can only hope he’s managed to survive the winters here in zone 7. As I recall, there were other, more appropriate, herbs in the Winakung healer’s garden, but someone must have felt that only yaupon could bestow that hint of holiness and mystery the place needed. (Though curious writers and armchair ethnobotanists used to be welcome to wander in and out of Winakung, the village is now open only to school groups.)
I don’t expect to stumble upon another yaupon here in New Jersey, but we do have plenty of other wild hollies in addition to opaca. One of my favorites is Ilex glabra, or inkberry. The leaves, just barely crenated, resemble bay leaves, while the lustrous black berries make it the perfect gothic Yuletide wreath. Please don’t go cutting it from the wild, though! Ilex glabra has many cultivars that you can grow in your own backyard.
Winterberry, Ilex verticillata, also lacks prickles. In fact, the leaves look positively deciduous, which they are. The winterberry’s leaves are shed in fall, but the scarlet fruits party on through the winter just like those of more conventional hollies.
Mountain holly, also known as catberry, doesn’t look much like a holly, and it’s not. True hollies have the genus name Ilex, and mountain holly belongs to the genus Nemopanthus. The mountain holly’s red berries, though not exactly poisonous, are relished by neither bird nor beast, but the Potowatomi managed to make a syrup by boiling its branches. At home in the swamp, mountain holly eschews the forest’s understory to form its own thickets in waterlogged soil.
It was in that same woodsy corner of the arboretum where I found the true holly, Ilex opaca, that I also ran into the most convincing pretender of all; a Goshiki false holly, whose mottled cream and green leaves looked to my unpracticed eye like any of a number of cultivated English hollies. But Goshiki is a cultivar of Osmanthus heterophyllus, a member of the olive family.
In Japan it answers to the name hiiragi, and hiiragi’s time to shine is at the festival of Setsubun, which celebrates the last day of winter at the beginning of February. The Japanese are better attuned to the changing seasons than the rest of us and can apparently detect signs of spring when there is still snow on the ground. Setsubun is marked by the widespread throwing of parched soybeans, the goal being to pelt as many demons as you can so they won’t follow you into the new year.
I had hoped to open this section on hiiragi with a quote from Basho, but it seems that the closest the beloved haiku master ever got to writing about Osmanthus heterophyllus is this observation of another festival, Boys’ Day:
iris growing
under the eaves from a sardine’s
weathered skull
Wait. Where’s the hiiragi? Bear with me. One of the most potent symbols of Setsubun is a sprig of hiiragi hung on the front door. The eighteenth century silk painter Shunsho has left us with a scene of two overdressed and rather clumsy looking courtesans attempting to hoist a third courtesan high enough to fix a sprig of hiiragi to the top of a gate. At the ladies’ feet is a small, red laquered stand holding more hiiragi twigs as well as three fish heads. Yes, fish heads, because no hiiragi charm is complete without a few grilled sardine heads impaled among the leaves. It’s not supposed to look pretty; the painful prickles and fishy miasma are meant to prevent demons from passing through the gate and into the home. Just as many Americans allow the ghastly remains of their Christmas wreaths to collide with their Valentine decorations some Japanese apparently neglect to take their sardine skulls down before Boys’ Day, which is celebrated in May.
In case you’re wondering, there is such a thing as a true Japanese holly. It’s inutsuge, also known in English as “box-leaved holly,” because it makes such a nice hedge. Its Latin name is Ilex crenata, but the notches in its leaves are hardly perceptible, let alone prickly, and therefore no deterrent to otherworldly troublemakers.
I’ve used up a lot of space describing the prickliness, or lack thereof, of the leaves of various hollies. Were I to devise a prickliness scale for the genus Ilex, I would put the mountain winterberry, Ilex montana, at the very bottom, and the good old English holly at the top. I have also mentioned that birds are either not fond of holly berries or they ignore them completely. So, assuming that the plant world does not concern itself with the comings and goings of demons, where is the need for prickles at all? It must be that someone, at some time during the holly’s evolution, tried to wrap their lips around those leaves and the holly didn’t like it.
In the case of the American holly, the culprit was probably the white-tailed deer. Ilex opaca’s spindliness means it does not respond well to too much pruning, so even casual browsing would have had deleterious effects. English holly looks like it could withstand a bit of nibbling, but let’s not forget that English holly has long been a denizen of the hedgerows, and hedgerows mean farming, and farming means livestock.
In this case, the proof of the pudding is in the attempt to eat it. In the mid-1800s, one Mr. Daker of Barton’s End in Kent noted how the uppermost leaves of his holly bushes had few or no prickles because his cows could not reach them. Factor in the insatiable sheep that have dotted English pastures for the last thousand years, and it is no wonder that Ilex aquifolium has armed itself so well.
Bibliography
Basho, Matsuo. Basho: The Complete Haiku. Translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Jane Reichold. New York: Kodansha International, 2008.
Erichsen-Brown, Charlotte. Medicinal and Other Uses of North American Plants: A Historical Survey with Special Reference to Eastern Indian Tribes. New York: Dover Publications, 1989.
Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. Guide to Trees and Shrubs of the Wildlife Observation Center, 3rd Edition. Basking Ridge, NJ: Friends of the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, Inc., 2011.
Kavasch, E. Barrie. Native Harvests: American Indian Wild Foods and Recipes. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005.
Leopold, Donald J. Native Plants of the Northeast: A Guide for Gardening and Conservation. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2005.
Ordish, George. The Living Garden: The 400-year History of an English Garden. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Taylor, Raymond L. Plants of Colonial Days. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1996.
Yoshida, Susugu. Ukiyo-E: 250 Years of Japanese Art. New York: Mayflower Books, 1978.
Linda Raedisch wrote her first book at the age of six on pages cut from a brown paper bag. She has been writing professionally since 2011 and her first book for Llewellyn, Night of the Witches: Folklore, Traditions and Recipes for Celebrating Walpurgis Night, has been translated into French. You can learn more about holly and other seasonal greens in her second book, The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (Llewellyn, 2013). Ethnobotany is one of Linda’s favorite fields, especially when it crosses paths with the supernatural, and she has been a frequent guest on the paranormal talk radio circuit. A shoe size 9 in real life, she maintains only a miniscule digital footprint.