Royal catchfly wears the most electric red in the native flora. Silene regia sends up leafy, upright stems two to four feet tall, topped in mid to late summer with loose clusters of brilliant scarlet, star-shaped flowers, each with five deeply notched petals. Few prairie plants flower in true red, and fewer hold that color through the heat of July and August, which makes this native a genuine standout.
Cup plant is a giant of the summer prairie, a statuesque perennial that rises on stout, square stems to eight feet or more and lifts a crown of bright yellow, daisy-like flowers above the border. The name comes from a quirk of the foliage: the large, coarse leaves are perfoliate, joined in pairs around the stem to form a shallow cup that catches and holds rainwater. Silphium perfoliatum belongs to the sunflower tribe of the aster family, Asteraceae, and shares that clan's generosity of bloom.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support, pain relief, digestive health
Gesneriads are supposed to be houseplants. Somebody should tell Sinningia sellovii, which comes out of a hard woody tuber the size of a fist, throws arching stems three or four feet long, hangs them with scarlet tubular flowers from early summer until frost, and then dies back to the ground and does the whole thing again the following year in USDA zone 7b. Gardeners who know the family only through florist gloxinias tend to find this genuinely disorienting, which is a good reason to grow the plant near the front gate.
Here is a tree almost nobody in American horticulture has grown, and the reason is not that the plant is difficult. Sinoadina racemosa is simply obscure: a deciduous member of the madder family ranging from northern Myanmar and Thailand through southern China, Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, and into Japan, running fifteen to forty feet tall with grey trunk bark and smooth young branches. In summer the tree carries small flowers packed tight into spherical heads, the heads themselves gathered into open terminal panicles, which is exactly what the epithet racemosa is pointing at.
Sinojackia xylocarpa is a rare flowering treasure from the hills of eastern China, a deciduous small tree or large shrub that few gardeners have ever met. Known as the jacktree, the species belongs to the storax family, Styracaceae, a close cousin of the snowbells and silverbells, and carries the same poetry of spring: pendant, bell-shaped white flowers that dangle beneath arching branches like small antique lanterns swaying in a breeze.
Sisyrinchium nashii 'Suwannee', Nash's blue-eyed grass, is a small, enchanting native perennial of the Southeastern United States, selected from populations in Florida's Suwannee River basin. Despite the common name, this is no grass at all but a diminutive member of the iris family, Iridaceae, betraying the kinship in the fine, flattened, fan-arranged foliage and the six-parted, star-shaped flowers. The species honors George V. Nash, the American botanist who described so much of the Southeastern flora.
This curious little Smilax is one of the quieter treasures in the Woodlanders catalog, a deciduous groundcover built of fine, twiggy, interlacing stems and small leaves, so densely and geometrically branched that the plant earned the house name Chicken Wire Plant. A member of the greenbrier family, Smilacaceae, this dwarf relative of the climbing greenbriers trades the usual vining habit for a low, intricate, shrubby tangle.
Dwarf greenbrier is the gentlest member of a prickly clan. Where most of the greenbriers, the Smilax vines, arm themselves with vicious hooks, Smilax pumila comes up soft and unarmed, a low, scrambling, evergreen groundcover of the Southeastern coastal plain, safe to handle and easy to place. The mottled, arrow-shaped leaves hold a quiet, marbled green through the year, and on female plants clusters of bright orange to red berries glow in the winter undergrowth like drops of fire.
Florists across the South have a name for the green that turns up at every wedding worth attending and every Christmas mantel worth dressing: Jackson vine. Southern smilax, if that is how you came up. The town of Evergreen, Alabama took its name from this very plant, which gives you some idea how far Smilax smallii has wound itself into the region's notion of celebration. Looped down a staircase, run along an altar, drawn the length of a table, they are the foliage that announces something is happening here.
This South American shrub is perhaps correctly Lycianthes rantonetti. It is a scrambling vine-like shrub which is best trained up as a trellis or espalier plant where it can get up to 15 feet in mild areas. It is valued for the loose clusters of bright violet flowers produced over a long period. Needs sun and regular moisture. Can be grown as a container plant and given greenhouse protection where climate is not subtropical.
Blue-stemmed goldenrod is the goldenrod for shade. Where most of the clan demand open sun, Solidago caesia threads through the dappled light of the eastern woodland, arching slender, blue-purple stems that carry small, brilliant yellow flowers packed into the leaf axils, so the bloom runs the whole length of each stem like a garland. That habit gives the second common name, wreath goldenrod, and the late-summer to autumn color arrives just as the shade garden begins to fade.
This small deciduous tree or suckering shrub has trifoliate leaves and interesting greenish-white bell-like flowers followed by curious inflated balloon-like papery fruits. It is best in fertile moist soil in semi-shade. It is native to eastern North America.
Stauntonia hexaphylla is a handsome, vigorous evergreen climber from the woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China, grown as much for glossy year-round foliage as for the famous fruit. The palmate leaves are cut into five to seven leathery, dark-green leaflets, held on a strong, twining vine that clothes a support densely from top to bottom. A member of the Lardizabalaceae, Stauntonia counts Akebia, the chocolate vine, and Decaisnea, the blue-sausage tree, as relatives.
Stewartia malacodendron is a much sought native deciduous shrub, and one of only two stewartias native to the United States. The species sits in Theaceae, the tea family, so the kinship with Camellia is real and visible the moment the flowers open: white, three inches across, built like a single rose, with a boss of purple-filamented stamens around blue anthers at the center. Nothing else in an American woodland looks remotely like it. The plant is found mostly on streamside slopes in rich woods and is widely scattered in spots from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, never in stands, usually as three to ten plants in a place. Bloom comes in early summer, a flower or two at a time over several weeks, and the autumn foliage turns orange to red.
Tall stewartia is an upright deciduous tree of medium size, and for most of the year the reason to grow one is the trunk. The bark sheds in thin flakes to leave a smooth surface of cinnamon and orange-brown, warm enough to pull the eye across a winter garden from some distance, and the effect only improves as the tree ages. Abundant small white flowers follow in summer and the leaves turn red and purple in fall, but the bark is the long argument. Reckon on twenty to twenty-five feet in a garden, though in the forests of Japan the species has been recorded at eighty.
Beaked stewartia is one of the rarest plants in a genus that has no common members, and we are indebted to Roger Gossler of Oregon for our stock. He calls the species one of the rarest Stewartias, grown above all for the large maroon calyx that closes around the seed pods once the flowers have fallen. "Very beautiful," he says, and Gossler has grown more stewartias than most gardeners will ever see. In the garden the plant makes a deciduous, multi-stemmed shrub or small tree, pyramidal while young and rounding into an oval with age, reaching anywhere from thirteen to thirty-odd feet depending on how patient the gardener turns out to be.
This small tree of Chinese origin has showy white flowers and fall foliage that is red or reddish, and the smooth whitish trunks with exfoliating bark are an important ornamental feature. In truth the bark is the reason most people plant one. Old stems shed in thin plates to leave a polished, mottled surface in cream, buff, and cinnamon that looks best in winter when nothing distracts from it, and improves every year for decades. The flowers arrive in early summer, white and cupped, about two inches across with a central boss of yellow stamens, unmistakably the work of a relative of Camellia. Then autumn brings a clean red. Very few small trees do three distinct things this well.
Stokesia laevis is one of those rare native perennials that marries toughness with elegance, a plant that has stood its ground in the Southeastern pinelands for ages yet looks as though it belongs in the most refined cottage border. Native to the sandy, open woods and pine savannas of the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Gulf coastal plain, this Stokes' aster rises each spring from tidy, semi-evergreen rosettes of glossy leaves before sending up broad, fringed flowers in shades of sky blue, lavender, or soft cream.
American snowbell is one of the quiet delights of the Southeastern wetlands, usually a graceful multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, though the plant can be trained up into a small single-trunked tree. Along streamsides and in low, wet ground from the coastal plain through the interior South, the shrub carries slender branches that hang, in spring, with rows of small, bell-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant and nodding on fine stalks so the whole plant seems trimmed in tiny lanterns.
Styrax obassia, the fragrant snowbell, is the bold-leaved cousin of the more familiar Japanese snowbell, a small deciduous tree from the mountain woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China. Where Styrax japonicus hides small bells beneath fine, layered branches, the fragrant snowbell wears large, rounded, almost tropical leaves up to eight inches across, and hangs long, drooping chains of white, bell-shaped flowers that carry a sweet perfume through the late-spring garden.
