Holly is a plant that permeates pop-culture. Whether you’re singing a holiday classic with your grandmother, walking along some neighborhood hedges, or brewing a cup of Yerba Mate to start your day, holly, also known as the plant genus Ilex, is often nearby when you know where to look. Today we’ll dig into 20+ different types of holly and holly trees.
What Is Holly?
Holly, or Ilex, is a plant genus made up of many hundreds of species. Depending on the species, holly can be evergreen or can be a deciduous holly. People can easily recognize this plant with its green leaves with bright red berries – but there is a lot of variety within the genus, too. A wide spectrum of traits distinguishes this broad group: spiny or full and luscious; bright or dark green; sun-loving or drought-tolerant.
Native regions of different Ilex species span from tropical regions to temperate zones and growth patterns vary from evergreen trees, evergreen shrubs, to climbers.
Often, you’ll see holly grown as privacy hedges and on disturbed ground. Holly is generally a very adaptable plant, making these small trees and shrubs popular landscaping additions in the appropriate hardiness zones.
To find out if your home or your garden is in a climate with a hardiness zone appropriate for holly, just do a quick internet search.
The Folklore of Holly
Today the plant is strongly associated with the Christmas season. In pre-victorian Europe, “Christmas trees” weren’t firs and spruces – they were holly trees.
But the folk significance of holly stretches even deeper into certain cultures’ collective history. For example, pre-Christian European traditions linked holly plants to various thunder gods. People planted holly outside their door, believing it would prevent lightning from striking the house. In Celtic mythology, the Holly King is often woven into lore as a giant and often linked to the “green man” archetype of Arthurian legend.
Even today, some superstitions around holly have stuck: it’s bad luck to cut down a holly tree, though, fear not, it’s fine to prune and bring into the home for festive decorations!
Deck The Halls With Dioecious-ness
There’s a lot more to holly than its decorative aesthetics, however. Ilex is a dioecious plant, which means that female plants and female trees are separate from male plants and trees. Depending on the biological sex of the holly plant, you’ll staminate or pistillate flowers.
Holly plants are flowering perennials, flowering in spring and early summer. Bees conduct pollination, turning the small green ball inside female flowers into red fruit.
When these branches of green leaves and red berries are cut, they are primarily used as an ornamental Christmas holly plant in winter plant displays along with spruce tips, boxwood, and Eucalyptus. The vibrant holly berries stand out particularly well in the winter landscapes of temperate zones.
For almost all species, the leaves and the red berries are toxic. The exception to this is Yerba Mate, which is an important cultural beverage in South America that has gained popularity around the world.
https://www.plantsnap.com/plantblog/holly-tree-types/