Ilex

The only native U.S. holly with both spiny green leaves and bright red berries - an upright, pyramidal, broadleaf evergreen tree that slowly matures to 15 to 30 feet in cultivation (to 50 feet in the wild). Thick, leathery, deep green leaves bear spiny marginal teeth, and pollinated female trees carry showy red-to-orange drupes that ripen in fall and persist through winter as bird food. This is the classic "Christmas holly" of wreaths and decorations.

Chinese holly (Ilex cornuta) is the only plant in this holly group that is not from here, and that is the first thing to say about it. It is native to eastern China and Korea, it is sold across the American South by the pallet, and Missouri Botanical Garden records plainly that "it has naturalized from garden plantings in North Carolina and Alabama". Kew's data adds introduced occurrences in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, both Carolinas and Tennessee, and the mechanism is the plant's own selling point: birds eat the showy red drupes and carry the seed into woodland edges. On its merits it is a genuinely tough broadleaf evergreen - 8 to 15 feet each way, heat and drought tolerant, deer-proof, comfortable in city conditions, and carrying the most distinctive leaf in the genus, a stiff rectangular blade to four inches with three big spines at the blunt end rather than the wavy spined outline of English holly. The catch beyond the escape risk is cold: it is zone 7 to 9, and Missouri Botanical Garden says flatly that "winter hardiness is a significant problem in St. Louis". Set against inkberry, yaupon and possumhaw in this batch, it is the one whose wildlife value stops at the fruit.

English holly is a slow-growing evergreen shrub or small tree native to western and southern Europe, northwest Africa, and southwest Asia, prized for its glossy spiny foliage and brilliant red winter berries. It tolerates shade, tolerates clay and acidic soils, and is remarkably long-lived, making it a stalwart structural plant for hedging and screening. The honest catch is its dioecy: you need at least one male plant nearby for female plants to berry, and those berries - the plant's most celebrated feature - are toxic to humans and pets, so any planting within reach of children requires clear awareness. In the Pacific Northwest and parts of coastal western North America it has proven seriously invasive, outcompeting native forest understory; gardeners in those regions should choose a sterile cultivar or a native substitute.

Inkberry (Ilex glabra) is the native evergreen shrub that does the job boxwood is usually asked to do, and does it on ground boxwood would die on. It is a slow, upright-rounded, five-to-eight-foot broadleaf evergreen of the eastern coastal plain, with small smooth-edged glossy leaves and none of the spines the genus is known for - so it reads as a soft green mass rather than a holly. Its fruit is the surprise: pea-sized drupes that ripen jet black, not red, which is where the name comes from and which makes it the odd one out in this group. It is hardy from zone 4 to 9, tolerates wet soil, erosion, rabbits, deer and city conditions, and Missouri Botanical Garden lists it for rain gardens and low hedging. Two things to plan for. It needs acid soil and goes chlorotic on lime. And it is stoloniferous - it spreads by suckers into a colony, which is a feature in a naturalized planting and a nuisance in a tidy foundation bed.

Japanese holly is a dense, small-leaved evergreen shrub native to Japan, Korea, eastern China, and adjacent regions of eastern Asia, widely grown as a boxwood substitute for formal hedging and topiary. It tolerates heavy shearing well and thrives in acidic soils in a range spanning USDA zones 5b-8b. The honest catch is twofold: the glossy black berries are toxic to humans and pets (a genus-wide trait of Ilex), and the species is listed as invasive in parts of the eastern United States, where bird-dispersed seedlings colonise native woodland edges.

Possumhaw (Ilex decidua) is the holly that drops its leaves, and the leaf drop is the entire point. Where an evergreen holly hides its fruit behind foliage, possumhaw stands bare from late autumn through winter as a thicket of pale grey twiggy branches packed with orange-red drupes - Missouri Botanical Garden records them ripening in September and persisting until March, which is four to six months of display from a plant with no leaves on it. The cost is honest and worth stating first: for the other half of the year it is an unremarkable large shrub with obovate dark green leaves and dull white flowers Missouri Botanical Garden calls insignificant, and its autumn colour is a muddy purplish-green or a modest yellow rather than anything to plan around. The second cost is the group problem. Hollies are dioecious, so a lone female never fruits and a male never fruits at all - though possumhaw is the one species in this batch where that rule has a documented exception, since Missouri Botanical Garden states plants are "mostly dioecious ... but some plants have perfect flowers". It reaches 7 to 15 feet in cultivation, tolerates clay and urban conditions, and is listed for rain gardens. The name comes from the opossums that eat the fruit; birds, deer and small mammals take it too.

A native deciduous holly of eastern North America grown for brilliant red berries that persist on bare stems through fall and winter - feeds songbirds and small mammals when little else is producing. Dioecious: one male pollinizer is required within 50 feet for every 10-20 female plants.

Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria) is the caffeine plant of North America, and the name on its label is a seventeenth-century slander. Its leaves and twigs carry caffeine, theobromine and theophylline - the same stimulants as yerba mate and guayusa, its South American cousins in the same genus - and roasted and dried they brew a tea that tastes and works like mate. Early European observers watched Southeastern peoples drink the ceremonial black drink made from it and vomit as part of the ritual, blamed the plant rather than the volume and the fasting, and Aiton fixed the mistake into the epithet vomitoria. Missouri Botanical Garden states outright that the name stems from a misattribution. As a garden shrub it is a slow, dense, thicket-forming broadleaf evergreen of 10 to 20 feet with small glossy toothed leathery leaves, showy translucent red fruit on pollinated females, and the finest twiggy growth in this group, which is why it is the holly that gets clipped into hedges and topiary. Three honest caveats. Like every holly it is dioecious, so a lone female never berries. It stops at zone 7, well short of inkberry. And it suckers hard: across the Texas Post Oak Savannah, released from fire and grazed heavily, yaupon has thickened into the understorey and shaded out the herbaceous layer, so Missouri Botanical Garden's line about removing root suckers unless you are naturalising it is not tidiness advice, it is that whole story in one sentence.