Small black blueberry is a low, delicate native of the sandy soils and pine barrens of the Southeastern coastal plain, a slender member of the heath family long gathered from the wild for its fruit. The species name tenellum means dainty or tender, a fair description of the fine stems and small leaves, and the common name points to the little dark berries that ripen almost black in late summer.
'Homestead Purple' is one of the great garden discoveries of the modern South, a trailing perennial verbena found not in a breeding plot but by the side of a Georgia road. In the early 1990s the University of Georgia horticulturists Michael Dirr and Allan Armitage drove past a sheet of royal-purple bloom at an old homestead, turned around, and gathered cuttings from a plant the owner said had simply grown there for years. That roadside find became one of the most popular perennials in American gardens, and the botanists gave the plant the name of the place it was found.
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.
Mapleleaf viburnum does what almost no other native shrub will do: thrive in dry shade. Most of the eastern American natives that gardeners reach for, serviceberry, red buckeye, sweetshrub, oakleaf hydrangea, want steady moisture and at least a few hours of sun. Viburnum acerifolium is the one that walks into the dry, root-tangled, low-light pocket beneath an established oak or beech and simply gets on with the job. The native range is genuinely vast, from New Brunswick south to Florida and west to Texas and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in upland forests, rocky slopes, and the edges of bluffs, making this one of the most widespread and most underused native shrubs of eastern North America.
'Pollinator' is a native smooth witherod grown for a specific and useful job: to pollinate the showier fruiting selections of Viburnum nudum, above all 'Winterthur' and 'Brandywine'. The species is not strictly dioecious, but the flowers set fruit far more heavily when a second, genetically distinct clone blooms nearby, and that is exactly what this plant provides.
'Winterthur' is the garden aristocrat of the native smooth witherod, an upright, well-built deciduous shrub selected by the late Hal Bruce at Winterthur Gardens in Delaware and awarded the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's Gold Medal, the Styer Award, in 1991. The glossy green leaves give the plant clean structure and coverage through the season, then turn deep burgundy and red in fall.
Walter's viburnum is one of the finest small evergreens of the Southern coastal plain, a fine-textured native named for Thomas Walter, the eighteenth-century Carolina planter and botanist who first described the species in his Flora Caroliniana. The botanical name obovatum points to the little obovate leaves, broadest toward the tip, and 'Compactum' gathers all of that into a low, rounded, mounding form densely set with small leaves and smothered in white flowers each spring.
Miss Schiller's Delight' is an excellent dwarf clone of Viburnum obovatum which is a fine small leaf native evergreen shrub. This clone was selected by our friend Steve Riefler in Florida. Steve named it for a friend whose name, like the plant, resembles 'Shillings's'( the widely grown dwarf Yaupon Holly). It is an especially floriferous clone. Woodlanders was one of the first nurseries to offer the now popular Riefler dwarf clones of Viburnum obovatum.
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.
Blackhaw Viburnum is an attractive small tree with oval leathery deciduous leaves and showy flat topped clusters of white flowers followed blue fruits which are attractive to birds. It has very interesting almost black checkered bark on the trunks. Plant in sun or semi shade. Soil should be well drained. This Viburnum is native to eastern U.S. and it becomes a small tree.
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.
