All plants /Shrub /Yaupon Holly
Yaupon Holly
Ilex vomitoria, holly family. Abundant in East and Central Texas.
At a glance
- What
- Leaves and young twigs, dried or roasted, for tea
- How
- Roast and steep like green or black tea
- When
- Year-round
- Where
- Understory thickets across the eastern half of Texas
- Value
- Caffeine, the only native North American source
Caution: The leaves are the tea; the red berries are not food and will upset your stomach. Do not confuse with Chinese privet: yaupon leaves are small, leathery, and scalloped, privet leaves are smooth-edged.
Harvesting
Strip a colander of leaves from a healthy thicket, wash, and roast on a sheet pan until they go toasty brown. The plant regrows so fast that ranchers curse it.
In the cup
Roasted yaupon steeps into something between green tea and yerba mate, no bitterness even oversteeped. It kept Native Texans and early settlers caffeinated for centuries.
Photo: Nhlord, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Forages well with
Forage safely. Never eat a wild plant on this site's word alone. Confirm identity with several sources, learn the look-alikes, and when in doubt, leave it in the ground.