Few plants carry a story like the Franklin tree. Collected from the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia by John and William Bartram in the 1760s and named by them for their friend Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia alatamaha was last seen growing wild around 1803 and has never been found in nature since. Every Franklinia alive today, in every garden and arboretum on earth, descends from the seed the Bartrams carried home to Philadelphia. To grow one is to hold a living piece of that lineage.
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
Hibiscus coccineus 'Lone Star' is the pure white form of the scarlet rose mallow, and the change of color changes everything. Where the wild species blazes red, 'Lone Star' opens great five-pointed stars of clean, luminous white, five to seven inches across, glowing against deep green, finely cut foliage and all the more striking in the soft light of evening. The same tall, architectural native frame carries a cooler, more serene presence.
Cuban rose mallow is one of the tall, slender members of the perennial hibiscus tribe, a plant that reads as airy and upright rather than bushy. Through the summer the stems carry fairly large flowers in a soft purplish pink, the classic mallow saucer set against distinctly gray-green foliage, and the stems themselves are lightly prickly to the touch. Rising to seven or ten feet on narrow clumps, the plant lifts the bloom well up where the color can be seen from a distance.
Hibiscus dasycalyx is one of the rarest wildflowers in the country, described only in 1968, and even then from a mere handful of sites in the bottomlands of east Texas, in Houston, Trinity, and Cherokee counties, along the Neches, Angelina, and Trinity rivers. The total wild population has been estimated in the low thousands. Whole seasons of botanical fieldwork across the Southeast have turned up fewer plants than a single good nursery bed.
Hibiscus moscheutos, the rose mallow, is the hardiest of the perennial hibiscus and the tough, cold-proof parent behind most of the dinner-plate hibiscus sold today. The wild plant is a stout, clump-forming perennial of eastern marshes, rising to six or eight feet each summer and opening broad flowers to six inches and more, clean white or soft pink with a dramatic crimson eye at the center. For sheer size of bloom on a plant that shrugs off hard winters, little else compares.
Hypericum nudiflorum is the early riser among the St. John's Worts, a slender, upright shrub that opens golden flowers as early as May, often a full month ahead of relatives. The blooms carry the many-stamened brush typical of the clan, set against broad, light green, oval leaves that give the plant a softer, leafier look than the needle-leaved species.
Hypericum reductum is the ground-hugging member of the family, a low, heathery evergreen that mounds and mats rather than climbing, rarely rising much above the knee. The stems are crowded with fine, needle-like, deep green leaves that give an almost coniferous texture, and through late spring and summer the whole low sweep is dotted with small, bright yellow, star-shaped flowers full of stamens.
Ilex glabra 'Leucocarpa' is the white-berried surprise among the inkberries, a native evergreen holly that trades the usual near-black fruit for berries of clean ivory white. On the ordinary inkberry the dark berries all but vanish against the deep green leaves, but here the pale fruit stands out cleanly and holds on the branches from fall right through to spring, a quiet, unexpected show in the winter garden.
Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite' is winterberry shrunk to garden size and cranked up in intensity. Where much of the landscape fades to gray, this compact native holly turns into a beacon, the bare stems packed with heavy clusters of large, glossy scarlet berries that color in fall and cling deep into winter, a living ember at the pond's edge or against fresh snow.
Every winterberry covered in red is hiding a secret, and his name is 'Southern Gentleman'. Winterberry hollies are dioecious, male and female on separate plants, and only the pollinated females set the blazing red fruit the species is grown for. No male nearby, no berries. 'Southern Gentleman' is the male who makes the show possible, and asks for none of the credit.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands, familiar in gardens for fragrant white flower spikes and fiery fall color. 'Shirley's Compact,' sometimes called Shirley's Midget, takes the species to an extreme: a true miniature, a dense little bun of a plant with tiny, twisted, inch-long leaves, growing so slowly that a ten-year-old clump may stand only a foot or a foot and a half tall while spreading two or three feet wide.
Juglans nigra, the eastern black walnut, is one of the great trees of eastern North America, a towering, long-lived hardwood native from the Appalachians and Midwest to the Mississippi Valley, most at home in deep, rich, moist but well-drained soils along river bottoms and fertile uplands. Large pinnate leaves cast a broad, airy shade in summer, leaf out late in spring, and drop early in fall to a soft gold, making way for the tree's most famous gift, the crop of hard-shelled nuts.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
50–80 ft.
Spread
40–60 ft.
Bloom
Green
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, detoxification & cleansing, general wellness
Spicebush is the shrub that tells you the ground is good. Early land surveyors in the eastern states used Lindera benzoin as an indicator of rich agricultural soil, and the rule holds in the garden: where spicebush thrives, most things will. The plant is a common understory shrub of moist, rich woods from Ontario to Florida and west to Texas, growing six to twelve feet in a loose rounded mass, often colonial from root sprouts, and every part smells of citrus and pepper when bruised.
Magnolia virginiana, the sweetbay magnolia, has long been a tree of distinction in the American landscape, ranging from the cool wetlands of Massachusetts to the Gulf Coast. Across that span the species wears two very different guises. In the northern states the sweetbay is a smaller, often shrubby tree that drops its leaves in winter; in the Deep South the species reaches fullest expression as Magnolia virginiana var. australis, the evergreen southern sweetbay, a large and enduring tree of great grace.
This is the uncommon pink-flowered Turk's cap, a soft-toned form of the familiar scarlet Malvaviscus arboreus, a subtropical relative of the hibiscus in the mallow family, Malvaceae. The flowers carry the same charming quirk as the red kind: two to three inches long, they never open flat like a hibiscus but stay furled in a little turban, glowing here in clear pink rather than red.
Malvaviscus drummondii is the small Turk's cap, the wild, native cousin of the larger Mexican wax mallow and, for many Southern gardeners, the better plant of the two. A relative of the hibiscus in the mallow family, Malvaceae, this shrubby perennial is native to Texas, the Gulf Coast states, and on south, and grows wild in the dappled shade of woodland edges and stream banks where few other bright flowers will bloom.
'Pam Puryear' is the soft-pink small Turk's cap, a lovely departure from the usual fire-engine red of this tough native mallow. The furled, never-quite-open flowers keep the charming Turk's cap form, less than two inches long and produced without pause through the hot months, but here they glow a gentle shell pink that reads cool and quiet in the summer border.
Morella pumila is the dwarf waxmyrtle, a low, native evergreen that keeps everything gardeners love about the common wax myrtle, aromatic foliage, waxy berries, and a tough constitution, and shrinks it all to knee height. Native to the frequently burned pinelands of the southern United States, the plant is an adaptation to that fiery world, staying small and spreading slowly into dense patches and colonies by underground runners.
Muhlenbergia dumosa, bamboo muhly, is a desert-born grass with the grace of bamboo, drifting like cloud shadow across the canyon floor. From the arid uplands and rocky washes of northern Mexico and southern Arizona, where sun-scorched cliffs and canyon walls shaped the character of the species, bamboo muhly evolved to thrive on dry air and lean soils, and yet carries the fluid elegance of true bamboo, swaying at the faintest breeze.
