Ilex vomitoria 'Lowrey's Big Leaf'

Yaupon is the small-leaved evergreen holly of the southeastern United States, native along the coastal plain from Virginia south to Texas, with outliers into Cuba and the Yucatan, and a member of the holly family, Aquifoliaceae. The wild plant is prized for fine, dense foliage that shears like boxwood, so a big-leaved yaupon comes as a small surprise. 'Lowrey's Big Leaf' is exactly that: an upright, evergreen selection whose leaves run conspicuously larger and glossier than the norm, giving the whole shrub a bolder, greener texture while keeping all the toughness of the species.

Behind the ornament sits one of the more remarkable plants in American ethnobotany. Roasted yaupon leaves and twigs were the source of the caffeinated 'black drink' that Indigenous peoples of the Southeast brewed for ceremony, council, and trade, and that coastal colonists later took up as a homegrown coffee or tea. Yaupon remains North America's only caffeine-bearing native plant. The unlovely species name, vomitoria, comes from a European misreading of the ritual purging that sometimes attended the drink, a charge the holly did not deserve, being no emetic in ordinary use; the common name is friendlier, from the Catawban ya'pa, a diminutive that means 'small tree.'

The appeal of 'Lowrey's Big Leaf' is that bolder leaf. Grown at the JC Raulston Arboretum and other collections, the plant builds into an upright large shrub, reaching nine feet and more with age and eventually taller still, dense and well-furnished from the ground. Like other female yaupons, these plants set bright red berries in fall and hold them through winter when a male grows nearby, so the larger foliage arrives with the usual bird-feeding fruit.

The heavier texture gives 'Lowrey's Big Leaf' a role the small-leaved forms cannot fill: a lush, glossy evergreen mass for the back of a border, a broad informal hedge, or a green foil behind flowering shrubs and perennials. The leaves take shearing, though the plant is handsome left a little loose to show the larger foliage. Site in sun for the densest growth and heaviest fruit, give a male yaupon such as 'Dewerth' within range for berries, and count on the same salt and drought tolerance that makes yaupon indispensable in tough Southern sites.