This is one of our native trees, frequently attaining to a great size on even wild, stony places, with only a thin layer of soil. We have seen some fine examples, large enough to secure the holly a place among our native forest trees on the “stony Cotteswolds,” as Shakespeare calls the high Gloucestershire range; it is, however, of slow growth, or it would, doubtless, be more used for fences: still in poor soils it will, after all, grow as fast as the whitethorn, Evelyn is eloquent in praise of holly. He says:—
Is there under heaven a more glorious and refreshing object of the kind than an impregnable hedge of about four hundred feet in length, nine feet high, and five in diameter, which I can show in my now ruined gardens at Saye Court (thanks to the Czar of Muscovy[23]), at any time of the year, glittering with its armed and varnished leaves? The taller standards, at orderly distances, blushing with their natural coral; it mocks the rudest assaults of the weather, beasts, or hedge-breakers,—
Et illum nemo impunè lacessit.
It is with us of two eminent kinds, the prickly and smoother leaved; or, as some term it, the free holly, not unwelcome, when tender, to sheep and other cattle. There is also of the white berried, and a[224] golden and silver, variegated in six or seven differences, which proceeds from no difference in the species, but accidentally, and naturæ lusu, as most such variegations do, since we are taught how to effect it artificially, namely by sowing the seeds, and planting in gravelly soil mixed with store of chalk, pressing it hard down: it being certain that they return to their native colour when sown in richer mould, and that all the fibres of the roots recover their natural food.
[23] The Czar Peter the Great resided at Mr. Evelyn’s house, in order that he might be near the yard at Deptford, during his stay in England; but we do not see why he should be thanked for the holly hedge.
The differences in the colour of the fruit, as of the colour and shape of the leaves, is truly a matter of variety. The red-berried holly, under the name of “Christmas,” is quite an article of commerce at the festive season—so much so that a friend of ours in the neighbourhood of Stroud, who this year (1864-5) had a large tree well covered with berries, assured us that he had great difficulty in preventing it going to market with some of the marauders, who scour the country in search of anything they can sell.
In the Worcester market we for many years noticed a sprinkling of white, or, rather, yellowish-berried holly, a spray or two of which was always put with the bundle of the red-berried in effecting the many Christmas sales.
As regards the difference in the leaves, although it is true that in the gardens we have a smooth and unarmed variety, however dwarf the specimen may be, yet in wild examples the smooth leaves will, for the most part, only be found on the upper parts of tall trees; the poet, then, has been as true to Nature as graceful in art in the poem of which the following lines form a part:—
Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen.
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;
But as they grow where nothing is to fear,
Smooth and unarmed, the pointless leaves appear.
Southey.