What it means
Holly people are said to carry themselves like leaders before anyone hands them the job. They set high standards, take responsibility easily and often rise to positions of authority. The tradition credits them with a strong sense of honor: they want to win, but fairly. Holly is a tough evergreen with armored leaves, and Holly people can be prickly on the outside while being generous to anyone who earns their trust.
Strengths
Leadership, a sense of honor, ambition backed by skill, generosity toward people they trust, and resilience when times turn hard.
Challenges
Pride, a need to be in control, prickliness, and impatience with people who don't meet their standards.
Holly dates and Ogham letter
Holly runs from July 8 to August 4 (28 days). Its Ogham letter is Tinne, the letter for the sound T. The dates come from the tree calendar Robert Graves set out in The White Goddess (1948): thirteen 28-day months named after Ogham letters in his Beth-Luis-Nion order, plus one spare day, December 23. It is a modern system inspired by the Ogham, not a calendar recorded from the ancient Druids, and scholars think only some of the Ogham letter names first meant trees. On the Western calendar, Holly starts in Cancer and the Sun moves into Leo around July 23, so roughly the first 15 days are Cancer Suns and the last 13 are Leo.
The holly in folklore
Most people think of holly as a winter plant, but in Graves's calendar it rules high summer, the weeks after the solstice, when the Holly King takes over the shrinking half of the year from the Oak King. Lughnasadh, the harvest festival of Lugh on August 1, falls in Holly's month. Medieval Irish scholars glossed the letter Tinne as holly, though the word itself seems to have meant a bar of metal.
How Cosmic Array reads it
Your tree depends only on the day and month you were born, so the year and birth time don't change it. The Architect blueprint shows your Celtic tree next to your Chinese animal, Mayan sign and Egyptian deity, and its written synthesis can set the tree against your Western Sun, Moon and Rising.