The Holly Bears a Berry
The crate of holly in this picture came in a few weeks ago, almost at the start of Advent. It’s Ilex aquifolium ‘J. C. van Tol,’ which is a lovely self-fertile female holly, popular because its pretty, glossy leaves are almost entirely thornless. There’s a variegated version (which we stock as lovely standard ‘lollipops’ in our Italian section), which has wide golden margins to the leaves. Another self-fertile variety is Ilex aquifolium ‘Nellie R. Stevens,’ which has beautiful, very dark green leaves and large, bright red berries. It is naturally bushy, making an elegant pleached tree. As well as these classically ‘Christmassy’ hollies, we also have the showy, variegated Ilex x altaclerensis ‘Golden King,’ which has flat, gold-and-green leaves and orange-red berries, and the lovely hybrid Ilex x koehneana castaneifolia, the chestnut-leafed holly, which makes for a larger-than-usual holly tree with long, serrated dark green leaves and huge red berries. If you think of holly as a prickly barrier, something to put in a hedge or walk past in a wood, these beautiful cultivars will show you something quite new and different.
Holly trees have been central to midwinter celebrations for centuries, even millennia, in their native northern Europe. In the darkest days of the year, the cut branches of woodland trees brought into the firelight and candlelight symbolised hope, their evergreen leaves and bright berries representing new life. Long before the Victorians made fir trees central to Christmas decoration, medieval churchwardens spent their annual budget on holly. Countless songs, carols and stories sprung up, to give reasons why holly was such a fitting Christmas decoration, of which ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ is the most famous. Devoting a verse each to the blossom, berry, bark and leaves of the holly tree, that carol has a typical Advent plangency. Beginning with the comparison of the white holly blossom to the lily flower (the token of the Virgin Mary, Christ’s mother), it rapidly moves from birth to death: the red berries recall Christ’s blood; the sharpness of the thorns and the bitterness of the holly-bark foreshadow the Crown of Thorns and gall of Christ’s crucifixion. This undercurrent of sadness counterbalances with the upbeat image of the Christmas hunt, the deer running in the forest at sunrise, and the choir singing in the church: typical post-Christmas entertainments from the period when the ‘Twelve Days’ after Christmas were celebrated to the full. I love the way that the carol juxtaposes two quite different types of time - the long-ago time of Christ’s birth and death that unfolds towards eternity, and the ‘in the moment’ present-day with its brief winter sunrise about to be swallowed up by dusk. We look into the past, but we live in the joy of the moment - and that’s Christmas.
But it’s a less well-known holly carol that brings us back to gardens and gardening. With its ringing chorus - ‘And the first tree in the greenwood, it was the holly! Holly! Holly!’ - the Sans Day Carol clearly has its roots in medieval traditions of Christmas. However, it takes its name from the village of St. Day, where it was first written down in during the early twentieth century enthusiasm for preserving traditional folk songs before they passed out of memory. In this case, the man responsible was one W. D. Watson. Watson was a gardener by profession, and a self-taught historian and linguist. He loved Cornish language and Cornish history, and believed that the Sans Day Carol must be a living antique, preserved through generations of Cornish singers. Watson was also Head Gardener at Morrab Gardens in Penzance from 1929-1951, where he was an innovator and a pioneer, specialising in collecting rare, semi-tropical plants. His work at Morrab anticipates the famous Eden Project by over half a century. Watson’s Sans Day Carol sketches out the link between the holly tree and the Christmas story in three short couplets:
Now the holly bears a berry, as white as the milk
And Mary bore Jesus, all wrapped up in silk …
Now the holly bears a berry, as green as the grass,
And Mary bore Jesus who died on the cross. …
Now the holly bears a berry, as black as the coal,
And Mary bore Jesus who died for us all.
To a layperson, the images here might be puzzling - and some versions of the carol change the first white berry to ‘blossom’. But Watson, as an interested collector, may well have been aware of a long-running claim (repeated by garden authorities from the eighteenth-century writer John Evelyn to Watson’s older contemporary William Dollimore) that white-berried holly genuinely did exist. Green holly berries are of course perfectly normal: you can see them on the photo of ‘J. C. van Tol’ at the top of this page. Ilex crenata, the small-leafed Japanese holly that is sometimes used for topiary, has naturally black berries. When Watson recorded his carol, it was still a relatively exotic import. I like to think Watson was drawn to this carol as a gardener, excited about discovering new varieties (or rediscovering old ones). Like a gardener, not shy of hybridising new and old, Watson wasn’t above adding to his carol. He polished it off with a final verse, triumphantly concluding:
Now the holly bears a berry, as blood it is red
Then trust we our Saviour, who rose from the dead.
In the nursery, we have rows and rows of Christmas trees waiting to be bought, as well as wreaths of holly and ivy (and pine, and eucalyptus …), and you can smell that pine-resin smell when you walk into the yard. I’ve bought my tree, but I can’t help being tempted back to those hollies, full of berries, with their reminders of past and present, old memories and new life. Happy Christmas!
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