Baptisia minor is the dwarf of the blue false indigos, a compact native perennial that gives all the drama of the well-known Baptisia australis on a smaller, tidier frame. Often treated botanically as Baptisia australis var. minor, the plant stands lower and more compact, yet carries full-sized spires of indigo-blue, pea-shaped flowers held well clear of the blue-green foliage. Much admired in the Woodlanders garden, this is a perennial that settles into a sunny bed for decades.
Baptisia sphaerocarpa, yellow wild indigo, is the sunny member of the wild indigo clan, a tough, rounded native perennial topped in spring with short, dense spikes of clear bright yellow, pea-like flowers over fresh blue-green foliage. Compact and shrubby, the plant brings strong color and structure to a sunny border.
Bejaria racemosa, the tarflower, is one of the odd and lovely surprises of the Florida scrub, a heath-family shrub that looks nothing like the rest of the clan. Where blueberries and azaleas carry small, fused, bell-shaped blooms, tarflower opens wide flowers of seven separate petals, white to soft pink and sweetly fragrant, held in loose summer racemes. The genus honors the eighteenth-century Spanish botanist Jose Bejar, and though older books spell the name Befaria, botanists have since settled on Bejaria.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine with bright trumpet flowers, and 'Helen Fredel' is a large-flowered selection in red-orange with a yellow throat, a shade between the old varieties 'Atrosanguinea' and 'Tangerine Beauty'. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine flowers heavily in early summer and again, more lightly, later, and shows to best effect on a fence, an arbor, or a trellis in sun or part shade.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine, and 'Tangerine Beauty' is the famous tangerine-orange selection, opening a spring blaze of bright orange, trumpet-shaped flowers and blooming again, more lightly, through the season. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine shows to best effect on a fence, a wall, or a trellis in sun or part shade, where the early trumpets draw hummingbirds in numbers.
Crossvine is a vigorous, semi-evergreen native climber that ascends by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, and var. atrosanguinea is the red one: where the typical crossvine flowers orange, this striking selection, introduced by Woodlanders, carries abundant deep red to red-purple trumpets, often over narrower, longer leaves. The flowers even smell faintly of mocha on a warm day.
Bouvardia ternifolia, the firecracker bush, is a compact, heat-loving shrub of the southwestern United States and Mexico, hung from late spring to frost with clusters of long, slender, scarlet-red tubular flowers. Few plants pull hummingbirds in like this one: the bright tubes are pitched exactly for their bills, and the bloom keeps coming through the hottest months when little else holds color.
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
Calycanthus floridus 'Athens', also circulated under the name 'Katherine', is a yellow-flowered selection of the Eastern sweetshrub, a deciduous native of the Southeastern woodlands long grown for fragrance, adaptability, and strange, many-tepaled flowers. Where the wild plant blooms a deep maroon, 'Athens' opens soft, buttery yellow, an unexpected and elegant turn on a familiar shrub.
Calycanthus floridus 'Michael Lindsey' is the sweetshrub gardeners reach for when fragrance is the whole point. The species, Carolina allspice, is a southeastern native beloved for reddish-brown flowers that smell of ripe fruit, but the scent varies wildly from seedling to seedling, and 'Michael Lindsey' was chosen precisely for a rich, dependable perfume. Add glossy dark green foliage and clear golden fall color, and this selection has become a benchmark, one the plantsman Michael Dirr called the standard by which other introductions will be measured.
Carpinus caroliniana is a native tree that hides its best feature in plain sight, a smooth, gray, sinewy bark that ripples over the trunk like the muscles of a flexed arm, giving the common names musclewood and ironwood. This small, slow, dense understory tree of eastern North America carries fine, birch-like leaves and a rounded, layered crown. The wood beneath that muscled bark is famously hard and heavy, the reason ironwood stuck as a name.
Carya aquatica, the water hickory or bitter pecan, is a large native tree of the walnut family, reaching ninety feet and more in the wild. Across the American South the species dominates clay flats and the backwater ground near streams and rivers, reproducing aggressively by seed and by sprouts from roots and cut stumps, and forming a major part of the region's wetland forests, in part because the more marketable timber trees around the water hickory have so often been logged out.
Carya ovata, the shagbark hickory, is one of the great native trees of the eastern woods, as easy to know by the bark as by the nuts. Mature trunks shed long, gray plates that curl away at the ends and hang loose, giving the tree a genuinely shaggy silhouette against a winter sky. Beneath that ragged coat stands a tall, straight, long-lived hardwood that can shade a landscape for two centuries and more.
Castanea pumila, the American chinquapin or Allegheny chinkapin, is a deciduous large shrub or small tree native to the eastern and southeastern United States. Long admired by rural foragers and old-time orchardists, this relatively rare native once flourished across the South, where children filled their pockets with the spiny burrs and the sweet, nutty treasure inside.
Buttonbush is a rounded, deciduous native shrub, easily trained as a small multi-stemmed tree, grown for the curious globe-shaped flowers that give the plant its name. From early summer into fall, creamy-white pincushion balls about an inch across stud the branches, each a sphere of tiny tubular flowers with projecting styles that lend a fireworks effect, intensely fragrant and alive with bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Hardiness
Zones 5–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, general wellness, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications
Few native trees announce spring like Cercis canadensis, the eastern redbud, whose bare branches flush rosy pink and magenta weeks before the dogwoods open. The small pea-like flowers cluster not just along the twigs but straight from the older branches and even the trunk, a charming trick called cauliflory, and give way to broad, heart-shaped leaves. A small, graceful understory tree of eastern and central North America, redbud belongs in the legume family, kin to peas and beans.
Leatherleaf is the quiet constant of the northern bog. Chamaedaphne calyculata, the only species in the genus, is a low, thicket-forming evergreen of the heath family that ranges right around the cold northern world, from the peatlands of North America east to the bogs of Finland and Japan, and southward in this country to the pocosins and acid bogs of the coastal plain, as far as South Carolina. Across that vast range, leatherleaf forms the dense, spreading colonies that hold a bog together and shelter the wildlife within.
The native fringetree is one of the great small trees of the southern spring. Chionanthus virginicus, a deciduous large shrub or small tree, often multi-stemmed, hangs the whole canopy with fleecy, drooping panicles of narrow white petals in spring, soft as torn paper and lightly fragrant, a look that earned the old country names old man's beard and grancy graybeard. On female plants the flowers give way to clusters of raisin-sized, deep blue-purple fruits that birds take quickly.
American yellowwood is one of the loveliest and least common of our native trees, a broad, round-headed deciduous tree grown for three good seasons of interest. In late spring, usually May, long pendulous panicles of white, pea-like flowers hang from the branch tips, sweetly fragrant and wisteria-like, a spectacle in the years the tree chooses to flower heavily. Summer brings clean, bright-then-deep green compound foliage, and autumn a dependable, clear golden yellow that is among the best fall color of any hardwood. The smooth gray bark, beech-like, holds the winter garden.
Clematis crispa, the swamp leather flower, is a small and delicate native vine that trades the flat, showy face of a garden clematis for something quieter and stranger. The flowers hang solitary and nodding, little urns of thick, leathery blue-purple, paler within, their four recurved sepals frilled and crimped at the tips like curled ribbon. Slightly fragrant and endlessly charming, this is a clematis scaled for a small garden rather than a barn wall.
