Prologue: A top seller with winter fire

I’ve learned to trust what people buy in the quiet season. Spring is full of obvious seductions—flowers, fragrance, novelty. Winter is more honest. Winter purchases are rarely impulsive. Winter purchases are about structure and survival and the promise of a garden that doesn’t go blank in January.

This past month at Woodlanders, our top-selling holly wasn’t the one people expect. Not a red-berried classic, not the predictable holiday script. It was Ilex vomitoria ‘Yawkey’—a yaupon holly that carries its fruit in yellow, held along fine branches like a string of lanterns.

If you’ve seen it in peak winter fruit, you understand the appeal immediately: it’s not loud, but it is luminous. And because yaupon’s leaves are small and its branching is delicate, the fruit doesn’t clump into heavy ornaments—it sparkles through the plant. This is winter interest that reads editorial: clean, intentional, modern.

The name that got it wrong

Let’s address the Latin at the door: Ilex vomitoria. It is one of botany’s more unfortunate decisions—an accusation baked into a scientific name. The plant did not ask for this.

Yaupon has a long Indigenous history in the Southeast as a caffeinated plant used for ceremonial and social drinks. European observers witnessed purification rituals and misunderstood what they were seeing; the plant took the blame. The name stuck, and a culturally significant native evergreen spent centuries wearing a label it did not deserve.

Here is what matters for the garden, and for the broader story: yaupon contains caffeine. It is one of the few caffeine-containing plants native to North America. That single fact is a cultural hinge—one that connects a coastal evergreen to ceremony, trade routes, diplomacy, and daily life across centuries.

Where yaupon belongs: the coastal plain

Before yaupon became a hedge in suburban America, it was—first and always—a plant of the coastal plain. Its native range hugs the Southeast and Gulf, extending through warm edges of the continent and into parts of Mexico and the Caribbean. In South Carolina, it’s a familiar presence in the Coastal Plain: thickets, maritime forests, sandy edges, wind-shaped places.

This is not a delicate evergreen. It is a plant built for bright exposure, sandy soils, humidity, salt air, and the long endurance of coastal weather. Its strength isn’t showy. It’s structural—an ability to keep going when softer plants fail.

Botanical character: what ‘Yawkey’ is

Yaupon is a broadleaf evergreen in the holly family, and it can be grown as a dense shrub or trained into a multi-trunk small tree. Its leaves are small, glossy, and subtly crenate; its flowers are small and white, typically appearing in spring. Like many hollies, yaupon is generally dioecious—male and female flowers occur on separate plants.

The species most often fruits red (on female plants). ‘Yawkey’ is different. It is a yellow-berried selection, prized for fruit that reads like winter light—especially when backlit by low sun. At Woodlanders we also value ‘Yawkey’ for its upright, spreading habit and the way it stays visually open enough to let fruit and branch structure show.

Origin story: South Island, Tarbox, Brookgreen

Cultivars are often introduced with marketing fog—names untethered from place. ‘Yawkey’ is the opposite. Its story is geographically specific, and that specificity is part of its allure.

Ilex vomitoria ‘Yawkey’ was discovered by F. G. Tarbox at South Island Plantation in Georgetown County, South Carolina, and introduced by Brookgreen Gardens. The plant’s name keeps the memory of that landscape: it is, quite literally, a selection with a coastal surname.

South Island sits in a region where land, water, and wind negotiate daily. If yaupon is a coastal native, this is the kind of place where a plant’s best characteristics are tested over and over—salt air, sandy soils, bright exposure, storms, recovery. It makes sense that a rare, yellow-fruited expression would be found not in a sheltered garden bed but in a living coastal system.

In other words: ‘Yawkey’ isn’t merely “yellow-berried.” It is coastal-tested. And when you plant it, you are importing a small piece of the South Carolina lowcountry’s botanical temperament into your own landscape.

Cultural connections: the “black drink” and a misunderstood legacy

Yaupon’s story runs far deeper than nursery trade. It belongs to an Indigenous botanical intelligence that understood plants not only as decoration, but as relationship—medicine, ceremony, community. The historic accounts that later got simplified into the phrase “black drink” point to a caffeinated beverage prepared from yaupon leaves and twigs.

What’s astonishing—what makes the story feel almost novelistic—is how far that beverage traveled in the pre-contact world. Researchers have identified chemical markers consistent with Ilex residues (including caffeine and theobromine) in specialized pottery beakers from Cahokia, a Mississippian center far north of yaupon’s core coastal range.

That suggests a network: plants moving, knowledge moving, rituals moving—or all three. A coastal evergreen becomes an inland ceremony. A shrub at the edge of salt marsh becomes a signal in a city of earthworks. Yaupon is a reminder that “native plant” does not mean “local-only” in the cultural sense; it can mean “woven into the continent’s memory.”

And then comes the irony: after centuries of cultural significance, yaupon enters the mainstream landscape primarily as a hedge. It becomes the thing you clip, the thing you “tidy,” the thing you forget is alive with history. That is part of why I love ‘Yawkey’ so much: the yellow fruit forces you to look again. It interrupts the hedge narrative.

Design: how to make ‘Yawkey’ read like intention

If you want ‘Yawkey’ to feel like a boundary-pushing design choice rather than “just another evergreen,” you have to treat it like what it is: a plant with line, light, and winter narrative. Here are the three compositions I return to again and again.

1) The Winter Lantern

Place ‘Yawkey’ where winter light can pass through it. Backlight makes the yellow fruit behave like a constellation. Morning sun is especially good; late afternoon is theatrical. Give it a darker evergreen or shaded wall behind it and watch the fruit lift forward.

• Pair with: tawny grasses, pale bark, seedheads, gravel paths, stone
• Avoid: cluttered, busy plantings that compete with the fruit

2) The Calligraphy Moment

Yaupon branches like handwriting. Let ‘Yawkey’ keep its line. If you must prune, prune like an editor: remove what weakens the sentence, not what makes it expressive. A lightly limbed multi-trunk form can feel sculptural—especially beside architectural hardscape.

3) Coastal Memory, Inland

Even inland gardens can borrow the coastal palette: a feeling of wind and salt and bright exposure translated into design. Use ‘Yawkey’ as an anchor in a composition built from sandy textures, native grasses, and plants that look born of heat and light. This reads contemporary because it reads true.

Care notes & planting strategy

At Woodlanders, we sell plants because we believe they can live well in real gardens. ‘Yawkey’ is not finicky, but a few practical decisions make the difference between “it survived” and “it glowed.”

Fruit requires the supporting cast

If you want consistent fruit set, plan for a compatible male yaupon nearby. (Many hollies are male/female on separate plants.) If you don’t plan for pollination, you may still get berries, but you are leaving the winter climax to chance.

Sun and placement

For the best fruit and a crisp habit, give ‘Yawkey’ good light. Full sun to bright part sun is ideal in most gardens. If you’re in intense heat, a little afternoon relief can be kind—but keep enough light for fruit.

Pruning (if you must)

Yaupon tolerates shearing, but ‘Yawkey’ is at its best when it keeps an open, expressive shape. If you prune, do selective thinning rather than repeated boxing. You’re not shaping a hedge; you’re preserving a silhouette.

Epilogue: a coastal sentence carried inland

When I think about why ‘Yawkey’ resonates—why it becomes a top seller in the stark season—I return to its contradictions. It is modest in leaf, but dramatic in fruit. It is native and tough, but visually refined. It is culturally deep, but frequently misunderstood.

And it is rooted in a real place: a yellow-berried yaupon discovered in Georgetown County, South Carolina, and carried forward through the careful stewardship of public gardens and serious growers. In the modern landscape, ‘Yawkey’ offers something we need more of: winter structure with meaning. Not decoration. Not nostalgia. Meaning.

Written by Fiona von Grey, owner of Woodlanders (Aiken, South Carolina).