The holly family
Aquifoliaceae contains one genus and several hundred species, and almost none of them look like the Christmas plant. Most are plain tropical evergreens, and one of them is the national drink of four countries.
one genus, Ilex
roughly 550 species
Worldwide, with most species in tropical mountains
Everything in this guide that belongs to Aquifoliaceae
Everything in this family belongs to a single genus, which is unusual for a group this size. What is more unusual is where the species actually are. The spiny, glossy, red berried shrub of a northern European winter is the exception rather than the type; the great bulk of the family is tropical and subtropical, concentrated in the mountains of South America and Southeast Asia.
A typical member is an unremarkable evergreen tree or shrub with plain oval leaves, no prickles at all, and small dull white or green flowers that nobody would look at twice. Most people would fail to identify one as a holly.
What holds the family together is not the look. It is a set of small consistent characters: tiny four parted flowers, separate male and female plants, and a fruit with several hard stones inside rather than one.
Look up a mature holly tree from the base and the leaves change as they go. Down at head height they are the classic wavy, spine tipped, unpleasant things. Higher up, above roughly the reach of a browsing animal, the same tree carries leaves with smooth flat edges and no spines at all.
This is not two kinds of holly and it is not age. The plant is responding to whether that part of it is being eaten. Leaves produced where browsing happens come out armed, and where it does not they come out plain, and a tree that gets cropped will produce spinier growth afterward.
It is one of the easiest pieces of plant behavior to verify yourself, and it is worth knowing when someone brings in a smooth leaved sprig and wants to know why it does not look like holly.
Yerba mate is a holly. The drink of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and southern Brazil, taken from a gourd through a metal straw and passed around, is made from the dried leaves of a South American tree in this family, and it carries a serious dose of caffeine. Guayusa, brewed in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is another.
North America has one too, and its history is worth telling. Yaupon, which grows across the southeastern United States, is the only caffeinated plant native to North America, and it was central to the ceremonial black drink of the peoples of the southeast. A European naturalist gave it the species name vomitoria on the assumption that it caused the vomiting seen in those ceremonies. It does not. The vomiting came from the quantity consumed and from other things added to it, and the plant has been carrying a libel in its scientific name ever since. It is now being revived as an American tea crop.
The red fruits are not berries in the botanical sense. Each one is a drupe holding several separate stony seeds, the same construction as a cherry except with four or five pits instead of one, which is why a squashed holly fruit is so much grittier than it looks like it should be.
The wood is the family's other quiet contribution. Holly is close grained, hard, and the whitest timber of any tree in Europe, near enough to ivory in color. It was the standard material for the white pieces in chess sets, for inlay and marquetry, for whip stocks, and, dyed black, as the cheap and convincing substitute for ebony in furniture and instrument parts. A great deal of what looks like ebony on old pianos is stained holly.