A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Nearly every rose in your garden that blooms more than once a year owes a debt to this one. 'Old Blush' is a China rose, bred in China for something close to a thousand years and known there as the monthly pink, and they are generally reckoned the first East Asian rose to reach Europe, recorded in Sweden by 1752 and offered in England as Parson's Pink China in 1793. They brought with them the one thing Western roses simply did not have: the habit of blooming again and again across the season rather than once and done. Crossed into the old European roses, that single trait rewrote the genus. On the Ile Bourbon they met an autumn damask and produced the Bourbons; in Charleston, just down the road, the rice planter John Champneys crossed them with a musk rose and produced the first Noisette, the only rose class born in the American South. Bourbons, Noisettes, hybrid perpetuals, and in time the hybrid teas all trace back through this unassuming pink shrub. 'Old Blush' could have retired on the legacy and instead just kept flowering. In the South they are very nearly everblooming, throwing clusters of soft semi-double pink that, in the China way, deepen rather than fade in the sun, blush going to rose as each flower ages. The canes are nearly thornless, the constitution famously tough; these are the roses you still find blooming alone at abandoned homesteads, having outlived the house and the gardener both. Grow them for the flowers. Know that you are also growing the root of the whole modern family.
Rosemary is a timeless classic in both the garden and the kitchen, an aromatic evergreen shrub of the sun-baked Mediterranean coast, so distinctive that botanists long kept rosemary in a genus apart, Rosmarinus officinalis, before recent study moved the herb into the sages as Salvia rosmarinus. The old genus name means dew of the sea, for the plant's love of bright, salt-swept coastal hillsides. Slender, needle-like, deep green leaves clothe the woody stems the year round, and soft blue flowers open along them from winter into spring.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
Rudbeckia fulgida var. fulgida is the true orange coneflower, the wild species that stands behind the famous 'Goldsturm', quieter, finer, and later to bloom than that celebrated garden child. From a low clump of dark, roughly hairy leaves rise branching stems two to three feet tall, each ending in a small golden daisy about two inches across, the deep yellow rays set around a low dome of brown-black. Where many of the black-eyed Susans have blazed and faded by August, the orange coneflower is only getting started, carrying many small flowers from late summer well into October.
Sabal tamaulipensis is a solitary fan palm from the dry limestone hills of northeastern Mexico, where the species climbs the San Carlos Mountains of Tamaulipas and neighboring Nuevo Leon. Stiff, rounded, blue-green fans are held on arching stalks above a trunk that stays short for many years, so young plants read as a fountain of palmate leaves close to the ground. In habitat the palm can eventually reach fifteen to twenty feet, though cultivated plants are slow and often stay compact, and older specimens sometimes recline on a horizontal trunk rather than standing straight. Small, fragrant, creamy flowers give way to round black fruit in the wild.
Salix chaenomeloides, the Japanese pussy willow, is a fast-growing shrub or small tree native to Japan, Korea, and parts of China, long valued in East Asian gardens for the show the plant makes in the depths of winter. Well before the leaves break, the bare branches set fat, silvery-white catkins with a soft, velvety nap, the largest and most striking of any pussy willow, and the branches are cut by the armful for early-spring arrangements.
The willows gave the world its first painkiller. Willow bark, steeped by Greek and Native American healers alike for fever and ache, carries salicin, the compound nineteenth-century chemists refined into salicylic acid and, in time, aspirin, which still wears the genus name buried in the chemistry. This particular willow comes by a quieter trade. Salix koriyanagi is the Korean basket willow, the name meaning just that, long grown across Korea, Japan, and China for slender rods woven into baskets and furniture by hands that wanted something straight, supple, and strong.
Salvia 'Indigo Spires' is a big, free-flowering hybrid sage grown for the long, tapering wands of violet-blue bloom it throws from early summer straight through to frost. Each spike packs small, rich violet flowers tightly in whorls above dark, near-black calyces, and the spikes lengthen and curve as the season goes, so a settled clump reads as a haze of deep blue-purple for months on end. Few perennials give so much color for so long a run.
Salvia leucantha, the Mexican bush sage, is one of the great fall salvias, grown for arching wands of flower that seem spun from felt. Long spikes rise above the foliage in late summer and fall, densely packed with velvety purple calyces from which small white corollas emerge, a soft two-tone effect that catches low autumn light and holds for weeks. Few plants close the gardening year with such generous, easy color.
This plant is a botanical time machine. Sarcandra glabra belongs to the Chloranthaceae, a flowering-plant family with only four surviving genera worldwide and a fossil record reaching back into the Early Cretaceous, more than a hundred million years ago. Pollen and floral fossils of the Chloranthaceae are among the earliest evidence of flowering plants anywhere on Earth, and the family was already abundant when the dinosaurs were only in their middle age. Today Sarcandra is one of just four genera left from a lineage that once spread across what is now Portugal, Spain, and eastern North America, and most of that Cretaceous diversity is gone. The little plant in the garden is a quiet survivor of a family that mostly did not make it.
Sarcococca orientalis is a fragrant, uncommon sweet box from China, a compact evergreen of the boxwood family grown, like its kin, for a winter perfume far larger than the flowers that carry it. In late winter small white flowers open along the stems, modest to the eye but richly and sweetly scented, filling a still, mild day with fragrance and giving the shade garden a lift when little else stirs.
Some plants arrive with a pedigree, and some arrive with a person. This one came to us from Ken Wurdack, a botanist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and his work centers on the systematics and evolution of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. He's the sort of botanist who describes entirely new genera in the tribe Hippomaneae, which happens to be the exact tribe Sebastiania sits in. So this is a spurge handed over by a man who names spurges for a living, which is about the best reference a euphorb could ask for.
Selaginella braunii, known in older texts as Selaginella involvens and in gardens as Braun's spikemoss or the arborvitae fern, belongs to one of the oldest surviving lineages of plants on Earth. The Selaginellas are not true ferns but spikemosses, an ancient group whose ancestry runs back more than three hundred million years, long before flowering plants reshaped the world. In the shaded understory of primeval forests these plants held their ground, and Braun's spikemoss carries that inheritance forward with quiet dignity.
Important: This plant is sold within South Carolina only.In the high-gradient streams of the southern Appalachians, the Gauley, the Bluestone, the Greenbrier, scattered tributaries of the New River, and a handful of similar second- and third-order rivers, grows a shrub that holds on to rocky bars and scoured banks where almost nothing else can. This is Spiraea virginiana, the Appalachian spiraea, a plant that evolved alongside the violent flood regime of these mountain rivers and depends on that disturbance. The floods scour competing vegetation off the banks, expose mineral soil for germination, and break off rhizome fragments that float downstream to colonize new sites. Where the rivers were dammed, the floods stopped, and the spiraea began to disappear.
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.
To see Styrax japonicus properly you have to look up. The leaves ride along the tops of the branches, all turned to the sky, while underneath, in late spring, hang rows of small white bells on slender stalks, so the whole horizontal tier of the tree seems lit from below. Stand beneath one in bloom and the common name explains itself.
The Sunquat began as an accident in a Beeville, Texas dooryard in the early 1940s, when a man named Leslie Cude noticed a seedling carrying fruit that looked like a small lemon and behaved like a kumquat. Walter Swingle, the great citrus authority of the day, took one look and guessed a cross of Meyer lemon and kumquat, which is where the name Lemonquat comes from and how it entered the collections as Citrus limon × Fortunella. The trouble is that the curators who have kept the tree at Riverside ever since have come to doubt him. The fruit, they think, points to a mandarin somewhere in the parentage rather than a lemon, which would make the plant a mandarinquat wearing the wrong label. Nobody has settled the question. The plant has gone out as Sunquat, Lemonquat, Lemondrop, and Marmaladequat, four names for one tree, each a different theory and not one of them proven. Asking a citrus to hold still long enough to be classified rather misunderstands the family.
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium, the aromatic aster, saves the best of the season for last. Long after most perennials have folded, this tough native throws up a low, spreading mound of stiff, well-branched stems and buries the whole clump under small violet-blue daisies, each lit with a bright gold eye, from early fall well into November. The show arrives just as the garden goes quiet, and the flowers hum with the last bees and butterflies of the year.
Bald cypress is the great deciduous conifer of the southern swamp, a long-lived, stately tree of river margins, bottomlands, and blackwater sloughs across the southern United States, and one of the most beautiful native trees the region has to offer. Soft, feathery, two-ranked needles clothe the branches in a light, bright green through summer, then turn a warm russet-orange and fall, leaving a broad, pyramidal frame bare for winter.
Thelypteris acuminata is a handsome evergreen fern from the woodlands of Japan and eastern Asia, grown for glossy green fronds that arch softly and hold their color through the year. Unlike the many deciduous ferns that vanish in winter, this species keeps a steady, structural presence in the shaded garden, one of the reasons the plant is prized where an evergreen fern is wanted.
