Holly

Overview

Holly is the evergreen that winter cannot touch. While everything around it loses its leaves, turns grey, and waits, the holly stands with the same dark, glossy, spine-armoured leaves it carried in August, and by December is hung with berries of a red so vivid it looks deliberate — a signal, an assertion that something in the wood is still alive and intends to remain so. It is one of the oldest sacred plants in Britain, with a pre-Christian significance that the Church absorbed rather than displaced: the holly decorates windows and doors at Christmas because it decorated windows and doors at the midwinter festival that Christmas replaced, for the same reasons, under different names.

Botanical Notes

A slow-growing evergreen shrub or tree to 15 metres, with dark, glossy, thick leaves with undulating margins and spine-tipped lobes; upper leaves on mature trees often entire, as if the tree stops bothering with spines once out of browsing height. Dioecious: male and female flowers on separate trees; both small, white, four-petalled, fragrant, from May to June. Berries 6–10mm, bright red (rarely yellow or orange), clustered, from October onward; produced only on female trees. Very slow to mature; can live several hundred years. Found throughout western and central Europe in woodland, hedgerows, and scrub. One of the most shade-tolerant native trees. The berries contain ilicin, a bitter glycoside, and saponins; theobromine has also been reported.

Lore & History

The contest between the Holly King and the Oak King — two aspects of the year god, one ruling from midsummer to midwinter, one from midwinter to midsummer, fighting at each solstice for dominance — is a modern folk myth of uncertain origin, popularised in the twentieth century but drawing on real folkloric strands. What is not modern is the practice of bringing holly indoors in winter: the Romans decorated for the Saturnalia with it; the Germanic peoples used it for their winter festivals; the Druids reportedly kept it in their dwellings as a refuge for woodland spirits during frost. The instruction to leave holly hanging until Candlemas (February 2nd) and to burn it rather than let it be touched by another hand is recorded in English county folklore from at least the seventeenth century. The old carol — the holly bears a prickle as sharp as any thorn — casts the plant's attributes as a typology of the Passion, a theological reading layered over an older tradition that had nothing to do with crucifixions.

Warnings