I’m looking to grow Ilex vomitoria (yaupon) in zone 6 - so far I’ve heard that the following cultivars are potentially hardy here:
Nana
Pendula
Pride of Houston
Hoskin’s Shadow
Shadow Female
Does anyone know of a good source - particularly for the last three cultivars? Been having trouble finding them for sale at affordable prices.
Also, has anyone else grown yaupon in the North?
I had to look it up 
Reviving this ancient thread because I’m obsessed with trying to grow yaupon in southern Connecticut. I’m shopping now, and what I’m going to do is buy several cuttings of the straight species and hopefully end up with one or two that survive, but @farmerjawn , did you ever end up getting any and what has your experience been?
I would also like to know!
I haven’t tried it, but in southern Connecticut, you could probably get away with one on the south side of a building in full sun. Also, I’ve been toying with the idea of growing it even further north in New Hampshire. Up here, I’d almost certainly need to give it winter protection, like a big mound of dry leaves.
There’s a Facebook group called Broadleaf Evergreens in the Mid-Atlantic. Check it out. It’s full of zone pushers. Maybe you can source some plants from the northern limit of its range. There’s someone growing it in 7a Delaware.
Do yaupon really have any cold tenderness? The winter storm in texas with low single digit temperatures didn’t damage a single yaupon as far as I can tell. It is considered a horrible weed around here. Grows in the understory and chokes out desirable shade trees. Impossible to kill mechanically and difficult to kill chemically. Very flammable ladder fuel which exacerbates wildfires. The tea isn’t even very good. I wish I could get rid of it.
That’s an interesting point re: the severe cold snap. I’ve never seen it growing in colder zones, so perhaps it can tolerate short cold snaps, but sustained cold is a problem. I’m going to have to respectfully disagree on the quality of the tea, though. Harvesting the early spring flush (especially from male plants) and roasting it produces an extremely good tea.
It is probably a poor competitor on better soils. And since it is evergreen with weak branches it probably doesn’t handle snow loading very well. There was a lot of limb breakage from winter storm Uri.
If anyone is interested, Experimental Farm Network has Yaupon seeds for sale. I am tempted but am already doing too much.
I have several I bought last year. Most were overwintered in pots within winebarrels. I’m zone 6B and it took a while for all the leaves to go brown, but none have started giving me green yet, so I’m a bit unconvinced they will have survived. They still give me good pliability when I grab them, so I haven’t decided to start cutting anything to look for green inside yet. (And they still look better than my gikgo seedlings; but those are slow starters around here.)
Not sure if it is used to make people puke
I have read about it being a emetic above Numerous times ,
but you know how the Internet is has a lot of copy .paste & generalizations
without factoring in major details or any source of reference.
See text below.
COpied from here
There have been compelling suggestions that—when the renowned Scottish botanist, William Aiton, overrode Carolus Linnaeus and slapped the name “vomitoria” on to the Yaupon binomial in the 1700s— it may have been the result of fraternal, nationalistic, or financial biases bent toward the interests of the East India Trading Company [8]. Yah see, it is said that Aiton had financial ties to the East India Trading Company, and the East India Trading Company was in no rush to promote a caffeinated beverage to disrupt its very lucrative traditional tea trade… especially not a beverage found in territories belonging to France and Spain. Even still, lacking a glue strong enough to cement the words plausible and truth together, we can only acknowledge the assertion has an undeniable ring of truthiness to it.
What we will be exploring is this: how did the act of vomiting become associated with a plant that does not cause vomiting?
What I have found is that most accounts of Yaupon being used ritualistically as an emetic seem to stem from a single source… the echoing remnants of a 455 year-old narrative; this is a story that does not mention Yaupon at all.
________________--------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Some person was removing Yaupon for free In Texas to resell Tea
I know of 2 other brands, but I never made it that I know of
I only made other species of IIlex or holly tea but just dried .
I should really try the bruising, and roasting as what I like the most is black tea , a every day thing
but really green tea is good too.
@jcguarneri
I see the video on my link, but didn’t watch (yet)
Do you have a technique all I ever saw was real tea being made.
If you watch is it any good.
Do you think the Setting it on a fire that is left with just burring coal would be good like article
it is wrote over a Century ago.
Is there a reason you specifically prefer tea from the male trees? I’m growing a columnar male selection so that I can keep it in a smaller space without any seed production thus limiting unwanted spread.
Regarding the vomiting, that is a ritualistic thing where copious amounts of concentrated tea would be drunk. Absolutely nothing to do with simply consuming it as a normal beverage.
Yaupon does fine in Mecklenburg, Gaston, Cleveland and Polk counties in NC.
I’d be interested to see if it survived -10 or something. …unproteccted.
This past January stayed in "zone 7’ conditions, so your plant should be fine this time.
On Facebook someone from Experimental Farm Network said they are going to work on crossing I. vomitoria with I. glabra (I think) for improved hardiness.
The flavor is just a bit nicer, more balanced I guess. Of it could be my imagination 🤷. It’s been a few years since I’ve had any, so I can’t say for sure.
My yaupon are right next to my tea bushes at the moment, next to a brick wall. It’s actually the camelia sinensis that look a bit traumatized, mostly because they didn’t drop most of their brown leaves. My larger yaupon is all brown leaves as well, but the ones in four inch pots are still mostly green, probably because the whole plants are fairly close to the mulch and a bit closer to the wall. We only had about five scattered days of single digits (°F) this year and nothing in the negative. I don’t expect to have lost anything I wasn’t going to lose already. All are still in pots, so somewhat more at risk than things in ground. What get’s us in my area is that Jack Frost spends the spring with us bouncing around on his pogo stick until around Mothers’ Day. He’s giving me big white flakes right now. I suspect he has a vacation home somewhere nearby.
What is your reasoning?
I disagree I was trying to show another point of view
Also I do not think any Native American Ceremony is as simple as that.
https://www.herbalgram.org/resources/herbalgram/issues/109/table-of-contents/hg109-feat-yaupon/
