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   Nearly everybody is familiar with American holly, Ilex opaca Aiton, due the spiny evergreen leaves and red berries that are often included in Christmas decorations.  The berries are only found on female holly trees.  I have seen a flock of cedar waxwings land on a holly loaded with berries and totally strip it within minutes if not seconds.  There is also a groaner of a joke about George Washington having wooden dentures and the wood used was from American holly because it is white, therefore, he was the first president with a ‘Hollywood’ smile. 

   There are over a dozen other native species of holly mostly found further south while their familiarity ranges from obscure to almost ubiquitous.  Even the specific epithet of Carolina holly, I. ambigua (Michx.) Torr., shows how obscure it is, while a couple other get both the vernacular name and specific epithet because they at least look like something familiar, myrtle-leaf holly, I. myrtiflolia Walter, and serviceberry holly, I. amelanchier M.A. Curtis ex Chapm., which is also known as swamp holly.  I’m not even that sure about Cuthbert's holly, Ilex cuthbertii Small, considering that species you have never heard of are often named for somebody you have never heard of either, and this is besides others I’ll not even mention since they are often just considered synonymous with other species. 

   A couple of hollies are interesting because they have black berries, namely inkberry, I. glabra (L.) A. Gray, and large or sweet gallberry, I. coriacea (Pursh) Chapm., although both are called gallberry, but the former is also called evergreen winterberry considering that all the other hollies called winterberry are deciduous.  I saw both black fruited hollies during a dendrology field trip, but not since (except in nurseries), which was fortunate because the rest of the class was furious when I asked if a plant with a black berry was the same as the one we had saw earlier or, as it turned out to be, the other black fruited holly. 

   There are a couple of hollies called mountain holly, the one with a matching specific epithet, I. montana Torr. & A. Gray ex A. Gray, is sometimes considered to be a variety of I. ambigua (Michx.) Torr., thus I may have seen one of these two, but the other mountain holly, I. mucronata (L.) Powell, Savolainen & Andrews, ranges further north and is also known as catberry.  The remaining three deciduous hollies in order of their wetland indicator status from wettest to driest are winterberry holly, I. verticillata (L.) A. Gray, possum-haw, I. decidua Walter, and Georgia holly, I. longipes Chapm. ex Trel.  The former tends to be more stiffly upright with densely packed clusters of bright red berries, besides having a cultivar selected to exaggerate this, and with almost thorny branches when compared to possum-haw, which often leans so much that the distal end of the stem is often lower than the middle, while Georgia holly has berries have long stems looking like miniature stemmed cherries unlike the other two. 

   The two remaining native hollies discussed here are both evergreen and from the Deep South, and in this region where both the number of holly species and abundance of individual holly plants are the highest hollies are important honey plants that as a group produce a monofloral honey, but I find that the flavor deteriorates with time resulting in a bitter aftertaste.  The larger is dahoon, I. cassine L., and in Spanish it is called cassena.  The most widely known is yaupon, I. vomitora Aiton, which has several cultivars found in the nursery trade more often than just the species, including one of the smallest dwarf hollies available, a weeping form, and another with yellow or orange fruit.  As I recall the dwarf is a male and the weeping form is a female so at least you can be sure of getting berries for the birds if you plant some of each.  The gray stems make this holly distinct from nearly any other species with a similar uses in the landscape industry. 

   Native Americans considered yaupon, which roughly translates to shrub or more specifically little tree, a sacred plant for use in purification ceremonies thus it was one of only a couple of tree species cultivated prior to 1492 outside the original range in North America with the other being Chickasaw plum, Prunus angustifolia Marsh., which prior to the use of herbicides was much more common along country roads than it is now.  Interestingly both P. angustifolia Marsh. and I. vomitora Aiton were probably first collected by William Bartram, but he didn't get credit for either discovery although the common names match the specific epithets he would have given other than where he sometimes used yaupon interchangeably with cassine similar to how he used alligator and crocodile interchangeably although cassine may have been a genera.

   The specific epithet of yaupon, I. vomitora Aiton, bears some additional scrutiny because it does in fact imply vomit due to the way yaupon was used ceremonially.  A very strong tea was made by boiling leaves that had been nearly scorched when dried over heat, which allowed more of a mind altering chemical to be released when brewed.  The tea was so strong that it was called black drink and a large quantity such as a conch shell full was drunk.  Shortly thereafter all Indians participating in the ceremony would vomit, thus the white men just observing thought the tea was poisonous, while a comparatively few white men who participated in the ceremony had no ill effects and didn’t even vomit.  Thus as a result of the majority of bad marketing yaupon was probably not widely used as a tea substitute during the American Revolution.  It turns out the cause of the Indians vomiting and the white men not is two fold, one is cultural in other words they were expected/conditioned to vomit and the other is the mind altering substance, caffeine, which the white men already used liberally in the form of coffee and/or tea, but the Indians were getting what amounted to their entire annual intake in this one large dose thus some effect from that could be expected.  I have made a weak tea a couple of times and it definitely has a better aroma to use mature leaves dried with high heat while fresh.  I prefer fruit juices and/or water, but if I wanted a tea my choice would definitely be yaupon.  A bonus of regularly using yaupon leaves and young stems for tea is that pruning will rarely be required or it will not be considered a chore.  In South America the drink mate is made from the dried leaves and stems of I. paraguariensis A. St.-Hil. 

   With all the native species and cultivars of holly I see little reason to plant any exotic hollies, because many of them become so overgrown that they have to be constantly pruned or even removed, which is not any fun in the case of Chinese holly, I. cornuta Lindl. & Paxton, due to the sharper spines on the evergreen leaves.  Japanese holly, I. crenata Thunb., at least has the redeeming quality of softer evergreen leaves and many cultivars ranging from little green balls to tall narrow columns.  A comment about one of these cultivars led to an argument with a stubborn know-it-all calling it by the trade name and insisting that I was wrong to call it a holly because it was the trade name only rather than a holly, therefore, I have little reason to do business at this or any other establishment where the customer is always wrong, besides every other place I have seen it had it listed both as a holly and by the trade name.  At the next worse place I was proven right twice (this involved species in a couple other genera and a priced item being available for sale), but I was still considered to be at least half wrong by some of the staff when the references they checked didn't agree with each other much less with them.  The in this vein the typical problems with communication due to confusions caused by using either common names and/or mispronunciation of scientific names are overlooked (besides there are no native speakers of Latin to give the correct pronunciations).