American basswood is one of the great shade and honey trees of eastern North America, a fast, stately deciduous tree with large, heart-shaped, softly toothed leaves and a broad, rounded, generous crown. Tilia americana has been cherished by Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and naturalists alike, and goes by a string of names: linden, bee tree, and lime, though the tree is no relation to the citrus lime. In late spring and early summer, hanging clusters of pale yellow, sweetly fragrant flowers open and hum with bees.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
20–30 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, respiratory support, digestive health
Confederate jasmine, or star jasmine, is one of the best-loved evergreen vines of the warm South, prized for glossy dark leaves and clouds of small, star-shaped, intensely fragrant flowers. The common form wears white blooms, but this selection, which Woodlanders offers as 'Mandianum' and which may be the cultivar 'Star of Toscana', opens flowers in shades of creamy to clear yellow, an unusual and welcome color in the tribe.
'Madison' is the cold-hardy Confederate jasmine, the selection that carries the beloved evergreen vine a full zone north of where the tribe usually stops. Vigorous and twining, with glossy dark leaves and the powerfully fragrant, white, star-shaped flowers that make star jasmine famous, this form has proved hardy into USDA zone 7, well beyond the reach of the standard Trachelospermum jasminoides.
The hybrid that earned a name the hard way. Viburnum 'Lord Byron' is a Southern-bred cross of Viburnum obovatum, Walter's viburnum, with Viburnum rufidulum, the rusty blackhaw, created by the plantsman Paul Cox of the San Antonio Botanical Garden and named for his son.
Few shrubs wear a name as plainly as this one. Odoratissimum is Latin for the most fragrant, the sweetest-scented, and sweet viburnum earns the superlative in late spring, when conical panicles of tiny white flowers open across the canopy and carry a soft, honeyed perfume on warm air. A member of the moschatel family, Adoxaceae, and a cousin of the elders and the arrowwoods, Viburnum odoratissimum ranges as a wild plant from the Himalayan foothills of India through Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam to China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, a broad Asian sweep that hints at the plant's easy adaptability in the warm garden.
A viburnum grown for the leaves rather than the flowers, and one of the rarest evergreens in the American nursery trade. Viburnum propinquum was described by the botanist William Hemsley in 1888 from the temperate forests of China, and the plant ranges through central and southern China, Taiwan, and north to Luzon in the Philippines. The species name comes from the Latin propinquus, meaning near or akin, a botanist's nod to the plant's close kinship with several related Asian viburnums. Woodlanders is among the very few nurseries anywhere to offer the Chinese evergreen viburnum.
Some viburnums are grown for the eye and some for the nose; the Burkwood viburnums are firmly the latter. Viburnum x burkwoodii is a cross between the intensely fragrant Viburnum carlesii and the glossy evergreen Viburnum utile, first raised by the brothers Burkwood and their partner Skipwith at their nursery near Kingston-on-Thames in England in 1924. 'Park Farm Hybrid' is a sister seedling from that same celebrated work, selected for a bolder flower and a deeper bud.
A neat, dome-shaped evergreen bred for foliage and form. Viburnum x globosum is a garden hybrid between Viburnum calvum and the well-known Viburnum davidii, and 'Jermyn's Globe' was selected as the best seedling from a batch raised at the celebrated Hillier Nurseries in England around 1964, chosen for the way the plant rounds into a dense, self-shaping globe. The cultivar name honors Hillier's Jermyns arboretum in Hampshire.
A tough, glossy evergreen born of two Chinese parents and a Prague nursery. Viburnum x pragense is the cross of the leatherleaf viburnum, Viburnum rhytidophyllum, with the service viburnum, Viburnum utile, first raised by the plantsman Josef Vik at the Municipal Nurseries of Prague in 1955 and named for the city in 1959. The epithet pragense simply means of Prague, a rare instance of a garden hybrid carrying a birthplace rather than a botanist.
A native violet grown as much for the leaf as the flower. Viola walteri, Walter's violet, belongs to the violet family, Violaceae, and honors the British-born botanist Thomas Walter, whose Flora Caroliniana of 1788 was the first flora of the American Southeast. The prostrate blue violet ranges in the wild from Texas east to Florida and north to Virginia and Ohio, threading the floors of moist deciduous woodlands and shaded rocky ledges.
Some plants stand quietly in the garden, and some speak. Vitex agnus-castus has been speaking for more than two thousand years, from sun-washed Mediterranean shores to monastery cloisters, from the herbals of ancient Greece to the borders of Southern gardens. In Homer's day the fragrant leaves and lavender flower spikes were woven into ritual garlands. The Romans knew the shrub as the chaste tree, a name wrapped in legend, since the peppery seeds were once thought to cool passion, which earned the seeds the cloister nickname of monk's pepper. The double name says as much twice over: agnus is Latin for lamb and castus for chaste, while the genus Vitex comes from vieo, to weave, a nod to the pliant branches once bent into baskets.
A superior selection of the ancient chaste tree, chosen for the size and color of the bloom. Vitex agnus-castus 'Shoal Creek' is a deciduous large shrub or small tree, native in the species to southern Europe and western Asia and long grown across the South for a long season of summer flower. The palmate, aromatic leaves have now and then been mistaken for those of cannabis, a passing resemblance that gives the plant a certain conversational charm.
A tough, salt-defying seaside groundcover with a serious caveat. Vitex rotundifolia, best known as beach vitex, is a low, prostrate, trailing shrub of the mint family, native to the coasts of eastern Asia, the Pacific islands, and Australia, where the plant binds shifting sand along the shore. Rounded, blue-green leaves about two inches across clothe the running stems, aromatic and slightly spicy when crushed, and spikes of bright lavender-blue flowers open in late summer.
A brightly variegated cousin of the chaste tree, grown for foliage as much as flower. Vitex trifolia, sometimes called the three-leaf chaste tree or Arabian lilac, is a warm-climate shrub of the mint family, native along tropical and subtropical coasts from eastern Africa through southern Asia to Australia and the Pacific. The species name trifolia points to the leaves, usually held in threes, and the selection 'Variegata' edges each gray-green leaflet in creamy white for a cool, luminous effect.
The muscadine is the South's own grape, and 'Triumph' is one of the finest for the home garden. Vitis rotundifolia is a vigorous native vine of the southeastern United States, the first North American grape brought into cultivation, long grown for thick-skinned, intensely flavored fruit and the honeyed wines of Scuppernong fame. 'Triumph', a bronze-fruited selection, carries that heritage forward with unusual quality and ease.
A timeless favorite with a bright twist. Weigela florida 'Variegata' is a compact, deciduous shrub grown for two gifts at once: cream-edged, softly variegated foliage and a late-spring flood of deep rose-pink, trumpet-shaped flowers. The genus honors the German botanist Christian Ehrenfried Weigel, and the species florida, meaning flowering, ranges as a wild plant through northern China, Korea, and Japan.
There are few sights more stirring than a wisteria in bloom, and 'Amethyst Falls' offers all the romance without the unruly habits of the Asian cousins. This refined selection of the native American wisteria, Wisteria frutescens, pours out cascades of fragrant, lavender-violet blossoms in late spring, with smaller flushes through summer, a soft echo of springtime returning again and again.
For the first sixty-five years in the books, this vine was filed as a kind of soybean. Linnaeus named the plant Glycine frutescens in 1753, frutescens meaning turning shrubby, and there the classification sat until 1818, when Thomas Nuttall looked again, decided a woody climber of the southern riverbanks deserved a genus apart, and named the vine for his friend Caspar Wistar, the Philadelphia anatomist. Somewhere between the man and the plant a vowel slipped, Wistar becoming Wisteria, and the misspelling has outlived everyone involved.
Some years ago the late Lynn Lowery, a pioneer of Texas native plants, found a fine selection of native wisteria near the dam of an East Texas reservoir. The dam was known as Dam-B, and Lynn gave that name to the plant, though some contend the true name was Damn Bee. Woodlanders thanks Dr. David Creech of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, for the start of this and several other fine plants.
A rare white form of the well-behaved native. Wisteria frutescens var. nivea is a twining, woody, deciduous vine with compound leaves and short clusters of pure white flowers that open with the foliage, far less rampant than the common Asian wisterias and, in white, a genuine rarity. This form was virtually unknown to American gardeners until Woodlanders brought the plant into the trade.
