How a popular native plant set itself free from its seasonal confines.
Illustration by Robert Meganck
It’s that time of the year when we are besieged with seasonal signifiers: peppermint and eggnog, Bing and Mariah, reindeer and gingerbread cookies, 467 million airings of Love, Actually—and holly, holly everywhere. The green sprigs of multi-pointed leaves. The brightly colored berries. Door wreaths and mantle decorations and ugly sweaters spangled with red blinking lights. But how is it that holly got itself so entangled with Christmas?
It seems to have been a matter of what we’d now call cultural appropriation. In the British Isles, the evergreen English holly was repurposed from pre-Christian solstice-season celebrations and freighted with Christian symbolism: the prickly leaves for the thorns of Jesus’s crown and the red berries for drops of blood. But the sad association doesn’t seem to have curbed people’s enthusiasm for festively festooning their homes with the plant when Christmas rolled around. A 2008 article from the Colonial Williamsburg journal Trend and Tradition notes that “Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly” dates at least to the Renaissance.
So when the earliest English colonists began settling North America and found American holly—a native plant that grows from coastal Massachusetts south to Florida and through the Gulf states to Texas—they adapted their traditions to this near-enough equivalent of the English plant they’d left behind. By Virginia Christmases of the 1800s, according to the Trend and Traditions feature, the sprigs and boughs were “everywhere,” a holiday juggernaut that earned the plant its common name, “Christmas holly,” and doesn’t seem to have lost any momentum in the intervening centuries.
But let us set holly free from its seasonal confines and bring it forth into the landscape. The plant equivalent of a totally chill friend forever unfazed by whatever comes along, American holly is a no-fuss native with pleasing versatility—a long-growing, low-maintenance, bird-friendly addition to the garden.
In the wild, American holly is typically found as an understory tree, but it’s a highly adaptable plant, according to Michael Andruczyk, Chesapeake horticultural agent for the Virginia Cooperative Extension. “It can tolerate full shade to full sun, and even in full sun it will do just fine,” says Andruczyk. The plant can handle salt spray, too, so you’ll find American holly growing on the Eastern shore, he says. It’s drought tolerant, but “it can take quite a bit of moisture,” too, he says, and it is also not particularly susceptible to pests or diseases.
As an evergreen, the plant of course offers a sustaining splash of color amidst the gray landscape of winter, particularly with the bright highlights of the scarlet berries (or even, if you prefer, berries in shades of orange through yellow, thanks to a variety of cultivars available). The leaves do replace themselves eventually; typically after two or three years, says Andruczyk, the old leaves will drop off as new spring growth is coming in.
Folk traditions once held that holly could protect against lightning strikes or, worn as a sprig or planted by the front door, ward off evil spirits. More reliably, you can count on American holly to serve as an excellent beneficial plant in your landscape. Flowering usually in early spring, “It’s an excellent plant for honeybees,” says Andruczyk. Because holly is dioecious, having both male and female plants, you need a male plant “within a bee’s flight—about a mile,” says Andruczyk, to pollinate the females, which are the only ones that produce berries.
The plant grows naturally in a conical shape, says Andruczyk, with the top branches growing upward, the middle growing outward, and the bottom growing down. Thus it provides an excellent year-round shelter for songbirds, protecting from predators as well as winter winds and snow. And of course the berries (or more accurately, “drupes”), which don’t fully ripen until late in the fall, serve as an excellent winter food source for birds as well.
However, do keep in mind that an American holly is not for the impatient nor the noncommittal; the plant can live more than 100 years and eventually reach a height of 50 feet or more. (In Virginia, the state’s reigning champion of an American holly is a multi-trunk tree more than 60 feet tall found in the cemetery of Christ Church, which dates to pre-Revolutionary times, in Old Town Alexandria.) Its growth rate, however, is less sprint and more languid amble. “Site it well” advises the Piedmont Master Gardeners’ website, because it is as much a gift for the future as an ornament to the present. Plant an American holly, and it will deck its own boughs for generations to come.
This article originally appeared in our December 2019 issue.