Spanish Moss and American Holly Postcard

The American Holly and Spanish Moss, two plants native to the American southeast, are entwined in a park in South Carolina. The American Holly, Ilex opaca, flashes its showy red berries, while draped with the flowering plant, Spanish Moss, Tillandsia usneoides. Holly is a popular winter Christmas and holiday season decoration. In English poetry and English stories the holly is inseparably connected with the merry-making and greetings which gather around the Christmas time. The custom is followed in North America, and holly and mistletoe are widely used for decoration of homes and churches. The European Holly is smaller than the American Holly, but closely resembles the American Holly. The leaves of both species are similar in outline and toothed and bristled very much the same way, but the leaves are brighter in the American Holly and a bit larger Spanish Moss's specific name usneoides means "resembling Usnea", and it closely resembles its lichen namesake Usnea, also known as beard lichen, but in fact Spanish moss is neither a moss nor a lichen. Instead, it is a flowering plant (angiosperm) in the family Bromeliaceae (the bromeliads) that grows hanging from tree branches in full sun or partial shade. The plant has no aerial roots and its flowers are tiny and inconspicuous. It propagates both by seed and vegetatively by fragments that blow on the wind and stick to tree limbs, or are carried by birds as nesting material. Spanish Moss is very common in the American South, hanging from live oak trees and many other kinds of trees.