By Tom Peterson
Not long ago I discovered several small yaupon hollies growing in my yard. The plant actually originated in the Ouachita Mountains (my Little Rock yard sits in their foothills) and made its way over the ages to the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In the South you may find them in the woods — they can grow as high as 25 feet — or as shrubbery outside a suburban home or in a Kroger parking lot.
Apparently, people in my neighborhood had been drinking yaupon tea for thousands of years. Known by many as “black drink,” it was important to native cultures from South Texas to the Chesapeake. It’s North America’s only caffeinated plant. Native Americans valued this cousin of yerba mate for ceremonial use. They drank it at social and political gatherings and liked it as a stimulant. Yaupon was also a medicine, and was traded among tribes as far away as the Great Plains.
Recently, one of my sons went into some nearby woods, gathered some yaupon leaves, and roasted them in the oven for 15 minutes. We drank our first yaupon tea. Hmm. Interesting. Actually, nice!
The more I learned about yaupon holly, the more excited I got.
Because yaupon is native to North America, drinking it here (and less coffee or tea) is great for the environment in many ways. It dramatically cuts the carbon footprint by needing fewer inputs such as water, fertilizer, and pesticides, and transportation. And yaupon holly strengthens biodiversity in its range by attracting bees, butterflies, and 20 species of birds.
Yaupon tea not only has caffeine, it also tastes great! And it has theobromine and antioxidants for the health conscious. Drinking yaupon supports local farmers and producers, strengthening local economies. In the last decade or so, we’re re-discovering yaupon tea. As many as a few dozen yaupon farmers and producers are sprouting across the South, and Whole Foods named it the top trending food of 2023.
So if yaupon has all these things going for it, why weren’t we drinking it all along?
The Latin name that changed history?
If you’re still reading, welcome to the Latin-name rabbit hole! Do you know the Latin name of any food you eat? Of any plant? Can you remember the last time one came up in a conversation? Probably not. Yet, it’s almost impossible to talk about yaupon tea without having the Latin-name talk. And that’s not by accident.
In the 1780s England’s King George III was having financial troubles, with substantial debt from both the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. This was worsened by the loss of revenue from thirteen former American colonies. Fortunately, he could count on his share from the Chinese tea monopoly to fill at least 10 percent of his coffers. Tea was critical.
But King George had a potential problem: Americans were shipping yaupon tea to very small but growing markets in Europe. In England it was called South Sea tea, in France it was Appalachina, in Spain, té del indio, or Indian tea. And though small, yaupon tea was an American thing, grown where neither the king nor the East India trading company had any influence.
Enter Sir Joseph Banks
In 1773 the king had appointed his advisor Joseph Banks to be unofficial director of the Kew Gardens in London. Banks played a key role in transforming the garden into a hub for research, economic botany, and exploration. A renowned botanist, he guided both the Crown’s and the powerful East India Company’s policies on plant introduction and agricultural development, shaping the Empire’s economic landscape.
For example, as chief botanist of Captain James Cook’s first expedition, Banks collected and documented plant and animal species from previously uncharted territories. He became an advocate for economic botany, using his influence to promote the cultivation of plants with economic value. He was instrumental in introducing breadfruit to the Caribbean as a cheap food source for enslaved people, organizing the famous HMS Bounty expedition to bring the plant from Tahiti to the British colonies in the West Indies.
Banks was clear-eyed about the commercial importance of tea to the empire. He concocted a secret plan to smuggle tea plants from China to India. This would end China’s monopoly. And by bringing it to the Indian colonies, it would greatly shorten the sea routes and increase profits. Banks died before this happened, but years later an English agent snuck into China’s guarded tea areas and got enough plants and tea experts for the plot to succeed.
God save the tea!
To help turn Kew Gardens into a renowned research center Banks recruited Scottish botanist William Aiton to oversee the a vast collection of plants from around the world. Including the yaupon holly from America.
Aiton is also known for something else. In 1789 — the year George Washington was first inaugurated — he published the Hortus Kewensis, a particularly important botanical book of thousands of plant species which were newly introduced to Europe from expeditions around the world. It’s a catalog of plants cultivated in the Kew Gardens.
This book came out a few decades after Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who established our system of naming plants and animals, published his Species Plantarum. And here’s where it gets interesting: Linnaeus had mistakenly assigned the name Ilex cassina to both the Yaupon Holly and Dahoon Holly in his 1753 publication. At the time, yaupon was commonly referred to as cassina in the Americas, especially among European settlers and naturalists.
A quick detour: When European explorers first arrived in the region during the 16th and 17th centuries, they wrote of the rituals and daily practices of Native American tribes, such as Creek and Cherokee. Yes, Native Americans, and the visiting explorers, drank yaupon as we would drink coffee today.
But it was also used in rituals that often involved drinking large amounts of tea to induce vomiting, which was believed to purify both the body and spirit. These “purging” ceremonies, often accompanied by chanting and drumming, usually took place before important events such as councils or wars. There is no shortage of speculation today about what actually caused the purging: the way the drink was prepared, other ingredients, and so on.
Aware of these accounts — in one of history’s greatest fake-news marketing masterstrokes — Aiton “fixed” Carl Linnaeus’ error and named yaupon Ilex vomitoria, meaning holly that causes vomiting. It actually doesn’t, but Aiton gave yaupon a Latin name that would suppress the yaupon tea’s future. In a final blow, he gave ilex cassina, the name yaupon should have had, to a different holly.
Even though the market for yaupon was small Aiton and Banks understood its potential risk to the tea monopoly. And they were, no doubt, testing cups of yaupon tea from their own plants. It’s easy to do! They would have tasted a really nice tea and would have noted that it didn’t make them vomit. Out of curiosity they may have then drunk, say, ten cups of tea and gotten the same result. Any economic botanist would have done this.
Now the Americans would have to market to themselves and to European customers a tea that “causes vomiting.” Mission accomplished!
A new chance for ilex vomitoria
Today, 235 years after the Latin-name put a kibosh on it, yaupon tea is making a comeback. This exciting resurgence is only a decade old. A handful of southern farmers are selling their yaupon teas in farmers markets, online and in an increasing number of stores. In just a decade, as many as several dozen small yaupon tea operations have cropped up. As demand grows so do the hollies. Hundreds of thousands have been planted across the south in recent years.
Make no mistake, Joseph Banks and William Aiton are still with us. They are doing everything they can think of to consolidate power for the few. As in the few large corporations that control the lion’s share of coffee, tea, chicken or anything else we eat or drink.
But here, maybe we have a chance to do it right. Meanwhile, let’s all go out and have a cup of yaupon tea!
Some other accounts of ilex vomitoria
There’s something about the ilex vomitoria story that causes some of us to tumble down the rabbit hole. Here are just a few other folks’ versions of this yaupon tea Latin-name coup.
BBC: Yaupon: The rebirth of America’s forgotten tea
Some Master Gardeners in Virginia