Iris verna is one of those plants that feels like a secret, small, fragrant, and impossibly charming once noticed. Native to the pinewoods and sandy slopes of the eastern United States, this understated iris has been a spring companion for centuries, brightening forest floors long before gardeners thought to give the plant a place at home.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of the wetlands, streambanks, and floodplains of the eastern United States, from New Jersey to Florida and west to Texas. Sometimes called Virginia willow for the shape of the leaves, though the plant is no willow at all, the species is prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and for a fall display of orange, red, and burgundy that rivals far showier shrubs. 'Henry's Garnet' is the selection that made the species a garden staple, free-flowering, with six-inch white racemes and a deep maroon-purple fall color that gives the plant its name.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a brilliant fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Little Henry' is the dwarf of the clan, a low, mounded selection that reaches only about three feet, packing the fragrant flowers and fiery fall color of the full-sized sweetspires into a tidy, compact plant for smaller spaces.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Longspire' is the selection chosen for its flowers: a form that carries notably long, white racemes, arching sprays of small fragrant blooms that outdo the wild plant for length and presence in early summer.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and brilliant fall color. 'Sarah Eve' is the exception in the family, the first pink sweetspire: the small flowers are essentially white, but they are carried on rosy-pink pedicels that tint the whole arching raceme a soft, distinctive pale pink, a color no other Itea offers.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, their name taken from the Greek word for willow. Itea yunnanensis is the Yunnan sweetspire, an evergreen species from southwestern China, close to the Chinese sweetspire but lower and more spreading, with more leathery, darker green leaves that are somewhat holly-like and toothed on juvenile plants and smooth-edged at maturity. In spring the plant carries slender four-inch racemes of small white flowers.
Jasminum beesianum, the red jasmine or Bee's jasmine, breaks the mold of a genus known for white and yellow flowers. This vigorous, semi-evergreen twining climber from the mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan carries small, star-shaped blooms in a deep rose to velvet-red, an unusual color among the jasmines, softly and sweetly fragrant, opening in late spring over slender stems and small, pointed green leaves.
Jasminum officinale, the poet's jasmine, is the classic hardy jasmine of old gardens, a vigorous twining vine hung with intensely fragrant white flowers through summer. 'Fiona Sunrise' is a gold-leaved form of that familiar plant, raised at Fromefield Nursery in England and registered under the cultivar name 'Frojas': the new leaves emerge a bright chartreuse-gold, lighting a trellis or fence, and soften to green as the season goes on, while the sweetly scented white flowers open from late spring into summer.
Jasminum polyanthum, the pink jasmine or Chinese jasmine, is the most floriferous of the group, a fast, evergreen twining vine that smothers a support in late winter and spring with clouds of intensely fragrant white flowers opening from deep pink buds. Native to China, the plant is beloved wherever winters are mild for the sheer volume of bloom and a perfume strong enough to fill a garden or a room.
Justicia brandegeana, the shrimp plant, is a subtropical evergreen shrub from Mexico, grown the world over for the curious, shrimp-like flower spikes that give the plant its name: arching, overlapping bracts in warm coppery orange, salmon, and rust, from which small white flowers peek like a shrimp's legs. The bracts hold their color for weeks, so a well-grown plant seems always in bloom.
The shrimp plant earns the name honestly. The arching flower spikes are built of overlapping bronze-to-pink bracts, each one curved and shingled over the next, so that the whole drooping cluster reads unmistakably as the tail of a boiled shrimp. This is the soft pink form, gentler in color than the coppery-salmon type most people picture, and out of the bracts slip the true flowers: slender, white, two-lipped tubes freckled with maroon at the throat.
Sheep laurel belongs to the heath family (Ericaceae), kin to the rhododendrons, blueberries, and pieris, and shares that family's love of cool, sour, peaty ground. The genus name honors Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist and student of Linnaeus who traveled the eastern colonies in the 1740s and sent plants and seed back to Uppsala; Linnaeus returned the compliment by fixing his pupil's name to this handsome American genus. The species epithet angustifolia simply means narrow-leaved, while caroliniana marks the southern form described from the Carolinas, distinguished by leaves softly gray-felted on their undersides.
Mountain laurel is the aristocrat of the American heath family (Ericaceae), a broadleaf evergreen native from southern Maine to the Florida panhandle and west toward Indiana and Louisiana, most at home on the acid, rocky slopes of the Appalachians. Linnaeus named the genus Kalmia for his student Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist who botanized the eastern colonies in the 1740s, and the species epithet latifolia means broad-leaved. To gardeners the shrub answers to a whole drawer of common names: calico bush for the patterned flowers, spoonwood for the wood, and simply mountain laurel across most of the range.
Of all the patterned mountain laurels, 'Bullseye' plays the boldest trick with color. The cinnamon-purple buds are handsome in their own right, and when they open the flowers reveal a broad band of deep purple-maroon ringing a white throat and a clean white edge, the concentric target that gives this selection a name. 'Bullseye' belongs to Kalmia latifolia, the broadleaf evergreen native to the acid slopes of the eastern United States, and represents the golden era of Kalmia breeding led by Dr. Richard Jaynes at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, whose decades of selection gave gardeners the banded, picoteed, and richly budded laurels grown today.
Most mountain laurels are shrubs with presence, upright and woody and faintly aristocratic. 'Croft Carpet' flips the script. This rare, prostrate selection of Kalmia latifolia stays low and spreads into a dense evergreen mat, delivering the understory finish that designers chase in shade gardens: lush, deliberate, and quietly polished. A specimen at the JC Raulston Arboretum measured only about one foot tall while spreading many times as wide.
'Pristine' is a pure white-flowered mountain laurel, a luminous departure from the pink and rose-flushed forms of the wild species. The selection was discovered in Aiken County, South Carolina by the late Mrs. Ernestine Law and introduced to cultivation by Woodlanders, a distinctive regional expression of one of the most iconic broadleaf evergreens of the eastern United States. Where typical Kalmia latifolia opens blush-toned, 'Pristine' unfurls in clean, brilliant white, a serene presence that reads especially bright planted en masse or set against darker evergreens.
'Willowwood' is a Woodlanders introduction selected from a mountain laurel found growing in Aiken County, South Carolina. What sets this laurel apart at first glance is the foliage: narrow, willow-like leaves that lend the shrub a finer, more linear texture than the broad-leaved wild Kalmia latifolia. In bloom, 'Willowwood' carries pink flowers with distinct banding, gathered in the familiar rounded clusters that make mountain laurel such a valued broadleaf evergreen for woodland gardens.
This seemingly unlikely hybrid crosses the familiar mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) with the diminutive, far less known sandhill laurel (Kalmia hirsuta) of the Deep South, two species that could hardly look more different. The cross was probably first made by the late, great Alabama nurseryman Tom Dodd, Jr., and further investigated by the Connecticut Kalmia expert Dr. Richard Jaynes, whose lifetime of work did more than anyone's to bring the genus into gardens.
Kerria is a monotypic genus, a single species that stands alone in the rose family (Rosaceae), native to the mountain woodlands of China and Japan. The old-fashioned kerria has bright green, arching stems and toothed leaves, and in spring the branches light up with flowers that in the common double form look like tiny golden roses. The genus honors William Kerr, the Kew plant hunter who sent the double-flowered form back to England from Canton in the early 1800s, and in Japan the plant is beloved as yamabuki, a name woven through centuries of poetry celebrating that spring yellow.
William Kerr arrived in Guangzhou in 1803 as the first professional plant hunter posted permanently in China, dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to send back whatever the southern port cities could offer. Among his returns was a double-flowered shrub with bright yellow, pompon-like blooms, gathered from cultivation and shipped to Kew in 1805. The genus was eventually named Kerria in his honor. His later years were less distinguished, marked by an opium habit and a thinning correspondence, and he died in Ceylon in 1814. The double-flowered form he introduced, 'Pleniflora', went on to become one of the most common shrubs in Victorian gardens, present in nearly every collection of the era and still widely planted today.
