Have a Holly Noxious Christmas? State board eyes un-jolly label for invasive greenery

Washington state officials are debating whether to brand a traditional holiday decoration a noxious weed.

The dubious decor is English holly.

While many landowners struggle to rid themselves of the sharp-leafed invasive species, the state's holly farmers have been fighting to keep the pejorative label off their crop.

Attitudes toward the painfully spiny shrub with bright red berries have changed dramatically over the decades.

O

n Arbor Day in April 1930, a reported 1,000 children assembled in Seattle’s Seward Park. They weren’t there to celebrate the lakefront park’s majestic forest groves, among the few to escape the ax as Seattle urbanized.

The Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and Camp Fire Girls were recruited to "improve" the forest by planting English holly seedlings in it.

A few blocks away, on South Holly Street, was a commercial holly farm, one of about 200 in Washington at the time. The nation’s largest holly farm was across Lake Washington in Bellevue.

From Aberdeen to Bellingham, children in the 1920s and 1930s were invited to take berries from discarded Christmas wreaths, crush them, plant them in sand, then plant the resulting holly seedlings in nearby forests and parks.

“There was a great push at one time to beautify the local forests and open spaces by adding holly to them,” said Becky Chaney, a landscape architect and volunteer with the Washington Native Plant Society.

English holly, as the name suggests, is native to Europe, where it has been a dark-season decoration since Roman and Druid times. No hollies are native to the Pacific Northwest.

“Holly should not be in our forests,” Chaney said.

RELATED: An invasive species, on San Juan Island?

Back in the day, the Seattle Park Board, Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and Seattle School District all supported a campaign to spread holly into the wilds of Washington.

Though it sounds like a group that would oppose invasive species introductions, the Washington Society for the Conservation of Wild Flowers and Tree Planting spearheaded the campaign. The society, started by Seattle socialite Lillian McEwan in 1927, estimated that 30,000 children planted holly in various parks.

McEwan’s group even led a movement to rename Washington the Holly State instead of the Evergreen State.

The annual planting parties went on for a decade. English holly eventually became the third-most common tree in Seward Park.

With the help not just of children but of berry-eating birds and their deposits, the European plant has spread from farms and front yards to forests throughout western Washington and Oregon.

Holly now covers nearly 9,000 acres of forest floor in Washington and about 1,700 acres in Oregon, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Nature observers have reported the invasive, sharp-leafed plant in 4,100 locations in western Washington over the past decade on the iNaturalist web platform, twice as many as in any other state.

N

early all English holly sold in the United States is grown in western Washington or western Oregon. The mild Northwest climate that favors holly cultivation has also made the region fertile ground for a holly invasion.

“Holly has been present at almost every site visit I have ever done (and I have done a lot all over the region),” Washington State University extension forester Kevin Zobrist wrote to the Washington Noxious Weed Control Board. “Landowners are frustrated by how hard it is to get rid of.”

English holly is a tenacious foe. Sprayed herbicide washes off its thick, waxy leaves. Leave any cut branches on the ground, and they can come back to life. Experts recommend injecting herbicide into holly trunks with a specialized tool that costs hundreds of dollars and requires a license to use.

“Many hours have been spent walking through the woods and injecting it with herbicide,” Joint Base Lewis-McChord forest ecologist Kathryn Hill wrote to the board. “And it is of course annoying to walk through.”

Chaney, the landscape architect, has been waging hand-to-limb combat on her forested acreage in the Snoqualmie Valley. On her four acres, native ferns and huckleberries, frogs and woodpeckers all live in the shade of towering conifers, with invasive species few and far between.

“I’ve been on my property 30 years, and I’m getting close to having all the holly gone,” Chaney said. “It is possible to control it.”

RELATED: These dogs sniff out invasive mussels to protect Washington waters

After walking through her woods in search of remaining holly, Chaney showed off her preferred strategy. She snipped some limbs off a scraggly holly at about eye level.

“If you cut it at the ground, it will turn into a massive holly thicket,” Chaney said. “You then find that instead of having one holly plant, you have maybe a quarter acre of holly plants, which displaces all our native plants and affects our forest health.”

For more than a decade, holly haters have been trying to give holly a bad name by putting it on Washington state’s official list of noxious weeds.

A

“weed” is just a plant growing where somebody doesn’t want it.

But a “noxious weed” has a legal definition. The plant has to be both invasive and harmful: “a plant that when established is highly destructive, competitive, or difficult to control,” per state law.

The “Class C” noxious weed listing proposed for holly would not bring any restrictions on growing, selling, or using the plant.

A completely different agency, the Washington State Department of Agriculture, oversees a list of quarantined species, which cannot be transported, bought, or sold anywhere in the state.

“People still sell many species of noxious weed, and people still buy them,” said Anne Schuster, a biologist on the Washington Noxious Weed Control Board’s two-person staff.

RELATED: This Ivy League wages hand-to-leaf combat against an English strangler

Go to a garden store in Washington, and you’re likely to find English ivy, baby’s breath, and butterfly bush—all on the noxious weed list—for sale.

“Noxious weed status does help with getting funding for management of that weed, especially in sensitive areas,” Schuster said.

Still, the holly industry has blocked efforts to call their product noxious.

“The perception that Holly has been a noxious weed has been floating around for 20 some years, and that perception has caused the sales of holly to diminish,” said Ken Bajema, a third-generation holly farmer in Skamania County. “It's impacted the growers’ ability to market their crop.”

Holly is a strongly seasonal product. Bajema said November is a busy time of year on his farm as they prepare boxes, talk to florists and wholesalers, and prepare for harvesting boughs from the farm’s 1,100 holly trees.

“It's pretty much a Christmas holiday thing,” he said of his crop.

Bajema also sits on the all-volunteer Noxious Weed Control Board: He’s both a holly seller and a holly regulator.

In 2022, Bajema and other holly growers convinced the board to keep commercially grown holly out of the proposed noxious listing, which only covered “feral” holly and specifically excluded holly on farms.

Then Bajema cast the deciding vote in a 3-3 tie that killed the listing altogether.

C

omplaints about that process led the board to change its ethics rules in 2023 to block members with conflicts of interest from voting or influencing the board.

Under the new rules, Bajema must recuse himself from votes and discussion on holly and refrain from attempting to influence board members on the matter.

When KUOW asked Bajema on Nov. 1 if he had a conflict of interest in regulating holly, he said he did not, based on advice from the Attorney General’s office from before the 2023 ethics rule changes. He also denied, contrary to scientific consensus, that English holly is an invasive species or that it is difficult to control.

“The holly growers don't really feel that it's a real big problem,” he said.

In 2024, Bajema has abstained from some holly-related votes but did vote to change the language of the proposal.

At a committee meeting in August, Bajema spent about an hour negotiating the language of the proposed listing to keep “English holly” and its scientific name, Ilex aquifolium, off it. He convinced the committee to recommend listing “non-native holly, Ilex species, (not including holly found in managed landscapes, or where commercially or agriculturally grown),” rather than listing “feral holly (Ilex aquifolium).”

“I think that would be something that would be satisfactory to the industry,” Bajema said.

There are about 500 species of holly in the Ilex genus, though only one of them, I. aquifolium (Latin for “needle leaf”), is invading Northwest landscapes.

“I appreciate everyone's openness to finding and, I guess, giving a death sentence to 500 additional species to preserve that right to continue to farm,” said noxious weed board vice chair Ian Burke, who was running the meeting. “These farms are investments, and I think we have to recognize that.”

Grant County farmer and weed inspector Allen Evenson has been the chair of the noxious weed board since 2023.

“I believe I have dropped the ball in dealing with the conflict-of-interest thing,” Evenson told KUOW before a Nov. 5 public hearing on adding holly and other species to the noxious list. “Going forward, it will be handled correctly.”

Evenson said all board members were asked to sign a code of ethics that includes an agreement not to use service on the board “for my own personal gain or advantage or the gain or advantage of my friends or supporters.” As of Oct. 15, only one board member besides Evenson had signed theirs.

Evenson said Bajema’s input had been “invaluable,” but he hoped Bajema would recuse himself from holly matters before the board.

“We can recuse somebody if they don’t recuse themselves,” he said.

At a public hearing on Nov. 5, several speakers criticized the language of the proposal to list 500 species as Class C noxious weeds when only one of them, English holly, met the legal criteria for listing.

“The proposed listing would potentially discourage people from using those non-invasive holly species as alternatives to Ilex aquifolium,” Kitsap County Noxious Weed Board Dylan Mendenhall told the state board. “That text, as it is currently written, that was explicitly crafted by a conflicted board member in violation of state ethics law.”

Two Republican state legislators from eastern Washington, where holly is not grown or invading, wrote to the board that there was not enough information to support a listing. Sen. Judy Warnick and Rep. Tom Dent urged the board to negotiate with holly growers instead.

The Washington Noxious Weed Control Board voted to postpone a decision on holly until March.

Bajema recused himself and abstained from voting.