Yaupon
Ilex vomitoria
also called yaupon holly, cassina
The South's workhorse evergreen holly, small-leaved and endlessly shearable, with translucent red berries the mockingbirds defend all winter, and a secret: it is North America's only native caffeine plant.
- Type
- Shrub · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green
- Flower color
- Red
- Sunlight
- Full sun to shade
- Watering
- Low once established
- Soil
- Any: sand, clay, wet, dry, salt air, reflected heat
- Feeding
- Gentle all-organic
- USDA zones
- 7a–10a
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Plant out
- at the last spring frost
- Plant spacing
- 8 ft 2 in
- In-row spacing
- 6 ft 7 in
- Between rows
- 9 ft 10 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody and fibrous
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 15–20 ft across, about 1.5–2× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 20 in of soil
A shallow woody framework with the fine feeding roots in the leaf litter above it. Those feeders are mostly under the outer half of the canopy rather than against the stem, which is where water and feed should go.
It suckers from the base into a thicket, which is why it makes such a good clipped hedge and why a single specimen needs the strays taken out.
The habit is Yaupon’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- When
- Leaves for tea any month of the year; shearing whenever a hedge needs it.
- What to look for
- Mature leaves, deep green and glossy; the tree is evergreen, so the pantry never closes.
- How to harvest
- Strip a colander of leaves and small twigs, roast at 150 °C until they go toasty brown (the smell will announce it), crumble and steep. Shear hedges in late spring and again in midsummer if wanted; it takes shaping like a boxwood.
- How often
- Tea as often as you like; the plant outgrows any picking rate.
- Storing the crop
- Roasted leaves keep a year in a jar, like any tea. Berries stay on the shrub for the mockingbirds, who will fight you for the hedge either way.
- Generally trouble-free No notable pest or disease problems when grown in the right conditions — one of the easy ones.
Roasted yaupon leaves brew a smooth green-to-black tea with real caffeine, drunk on this continent for a thousand years and sold again now by Texas roasters. The unfortunate latin is a slander: the historical purge ritual it references came from drinking it by the gallon, not from the plant.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com