Carolina jessamine is the twining gold of the Southern spring, native to the southern United States and honored as the state flower of South Carolina. An evergreen vine of easy grace, the plant clothes a fence or trellis in glossy, narrow leaves and, as winter loosens, opens a wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that scent the whole garden.
'Pride of Augusta' is the old double-flowered Carolina jessamine, a twining evergreen vine that turns the familiar Southern gold into something fuller and more lavish. Where the wild species opens simple funnels, this selection packs each bloom with extra petals, so the vine carries a long, generous show of ruffled, double yellow flowers, sweetly fragrant, from late winter into early spring.
Carolina jessamine is the state flower of South Carolina and one of the most beloved evergreen vines of the South, prized for the wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that opens the gardening year. 'Margarita' is the cold-hardy answer to that beauty, a selection that carries the same sweet-scented gold well north of where the species usually gives out.
In the dappled understory of the Eastern woods, Geranium maculatum has made a home for as long as the forests have stood. Known to generations as wild geranium or cranesbill, this native perennial forms a tidy clump of softly lobed leaves and lifts loose sprays of rose-purple, five-petaled flowers, as much a part of the old spring landscape as dogwood and trillium.
Some plants elevate the familiar into the extraordinary, and Gordonia lasianthus 'Variegata' does exactly that, taking the quiet majesty of the native loblolly bay and dressing it in a silken fringe of cream. The glossy green leaves are edged in irregular strokes of ivory, as though touched by the brush of some moonlit painter in the pine woods, and the whole shrub glimmers softly through every season.
Grevillea 'Canberra Gem' is a bold and unusual Australian evergreen, a hybrid of Grevillea juniperina and Grevillea rosmarinifolia that brings fine texture, vivid color, and a touch of the exotic to an adventurous garden. The narrow, needle-like foliage is often mistaken for a conifer, until late winter, when the shrub reveals a true identity in a profusion of rose-red, spider-like flowers that spill from the branches and catch the eye clear across the garden.
Grevillea rosmarinifolia is a fine-textured Australian evergreen, a rounded to semi-prostrate shrub whose narrow, deep green leaves look uncannily like rosemary, giving the plant both the species name and a handsome, needled presence the year round. The likeness is only skin-deep, for this is a member of the protea family, Proteaceae, worlds away from any herb.
Gymnocladus dioicus, the Kentucky coffeetree, is a bold, handsome native shade tree that keeps its own unhurried calendar, among the last trees to leaf out in spring and the first to stand bare in fall. That long leafless season gave the tree a curious name, which means naked branch, and the winter silhouette of thick, blunt, sculptural limbs is a feature in itself. Hillier's great manual calls the Kentucky coffeetree one of the most handsome of all hardy trees, and few who grow one would disagree.
Carolina silverbell is one of the loveliest of the small native trees of the Southern woods, a deciduous tree of the southeastern United States that lights the spring understory with hundreds of little white bells. In April and May, before or as the leaves unfold, the branches hang thick with clusters of nodding, bell-shaped white flowers, an effect much like a flowering dogwood but softer, and just as welcome at the woodland edge.
In spring, the bare gray branches of the two-wing silverbell fill with small white bells, three to six to a cluster, hanging along the year-old wood like a run of tiny lanterns. Each flower is a half-inch, four-lobed cup, and en masse they turn a modest understory tree into one of the quiet highlights of the southern woodland spring. This silverbell grows as a large multi-stemmed shrub or a small tree, rarely more than thirty feet, with an open, layered frame that lets light through to whatever grows below.
Of all the silverbells, this is the one plant hunters remember. Halesia diptera var. magniflora is the large-flowered form of the two-wing silverbell, and the difference is not subtle: the white, bell-shaped flowers run half again larger than the type, sometimes an inch and more across, with the lobes cut so deeply that each bloom flares open like a little white star rather than a closed bell. In full flower, before the leaves are fully out, the branches all but vanish beneath them, and a mature specimen becomes a cloud of white in the April woods.
Firebush earns the name honestly. From late spring until the first frost, the arching branch tips carry tight clusters of slender tubular flowers in hot orange-red, each one a narrow torch held out for the hummingbirds and butterflies that work the plant from morning to dusk. The foliage plays along: new leaves and stems flush bronze to burgundy, the veins stained red, so that even between flushes of bloom the whole shrub reads warm. Few plants pull in as much winged traffic through the heat of a southern summer.
This is a cold-hardy citrus hybrid bred to carry oranges into gardens too cold for ordinary citrus, a cross between the trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, in the large-flowered form called 'English Large', and the notably hardy Changsha mandarin, Citrus reticulata. Both parents are prized for cold tolerance, and stacking the two produces a small, thorny tree that shrugs off freezes that would kill a true orange. The cross matches the well-known US-852 citrandarin, a hardy-citrus line from the USDA breeding program.
This ginger relative is a tall herbaceous perennial spreading by rhizomes. Showy spikes of reddish flowers on terminals of tall plants with long corn-like leaves. It spreads to form colonies in rich moist soil in sunny or semi-shady areas. Woodlanders originally obtained this Asian native ginger as seed from Coimbra, Portugal.
Hedychium coccineum 'Disney' is a hardy ginger lily that brings the tropics to a temperate garden, sending up tall leafy canes each summer and crowning them, from late summer into fall, with bold spikes of fragrant orange flowers. Each bloom throws out long, whiskery stamens for a bottlebrush effect, and the whole spike carries a sweet perfume that drifts on warm evening air. 'Disney' is among the best and most upright selections of the scarlet ginger lily, holding the flower heads proudly above the foliage.
The name does the plant no favors. "Swamp sunflower" conjures boggy ground and standing water, which is where you find the plant in the wild, yes, but not where you need to plant this sunflower in the garden. Helianthus angustifolius tolerates wet soils in nature because wet soils are where the plant manages to grow without being outcompeted. Given good sun and average garden moisture, the sunflower performs considerably better and needs no drainage problem to justify a place. The name is a provenance note, not a planting instruction.
Helianthus verticillatus is a sunflower you grow as much for the story as the flower, though the flower holds up on merit. The plainest field mark is the leaves: narrow, lance-shaped, and arranged in distinct whorls of three or four around the stem rather than in the usual opposite or alternate pairs, a tidy structural signature that names the plant and sets the species apart from every common sunflower. Tall and strong-stemmed, the plant rises six to ten feet and lifts open clusters of clear yellow, dark-centered flowers in late summer and early fall.
The Lenten rose is not a rose at all, but a member of the buttercup tribe that happens to flower around Lent, in the raw weeks of late winter when the garden is otherwise bare. The blooms are nodding cups a couple of inches across, held just above the foliage in white, cream, pink, plum, and a smoky green, many of them freckled or veined at the throat. What look like petals are in fact sepals, which is the secret of the long show: rather than dropping in days, the flowers hold for weeks and age slowly to green, carrying color from late winter well into spring.
