Ilex vomitoria 'Yawkey'

Yaupon is the small-leaved evergreen holly of the Southeast, native along the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas and a member of the holly family, Aquifoliaceae. Salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and willing in sun or shade, the species shears as cleanly as boxwood and has long been a Southern mainstay for hedges and clipped structure, the females carrying translucent scarlet berries into winter. 'Yawkey' rewrites that last detail in a rarer color: this is a yellow-berried yaupon, hung each winter with soft amber-gold fruit instead of red, on an upright, somewhat open and spreading frame.

The species behind this oddity is no ordinary shrub. 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 drank as a homegrown coffee or tea. Yaupon remains North America's only caffeine-bearing native plant. The unkind species name, vomitoria, records a European misreading of the ritual purging that sometimes attended the drink, a fault the holly does not carry, being no emetic in normal use; the common name, from the Catawban ya'pa, means simply 'small tree.'

The yellow-fruited form was found by F.G. Tarbox, Jr. on the T.A. Yawkey Plantation in Georgetown County, South Carolina, and introduced by Brookgreen Gardens, where a single rescued seedling first fruited in 1943. Tarbox described the plant as Ilex vomitoria variety yawkeyii, the berries yellow, four to six millimeters across and slightly flattened; at the time only a couple of other plants were known to exist. Even now the yellow yaupons remain scarce in the trade, which is much of the appeal for collectors and designers hunting something out of the ordinary.

In the garden 'Yawkey' plays against every expectation of a holly. The amber-gold fruit glows where scarlet would shout, lovely against dark evergreens, a gray wall, or a winter sky, and pairs beautifully with a red-berried yaupon for a two-tone planting. The upright, open habit suits an informal screen or a specimen more than a tight clipped hedge, though the plant shears if asked. Site in sun for the best fruit, keep a male yaupon such as 'Dewerth' within range for pollination, and enjoy a native evergreen that shrugs off salt, drought, and heat. Read our field notes and design guide for this holly here.