Sageretia minutiflora

Sageretia minutiflora, the shellmound buckthorn, is a rare and little-known native shrub of the Southeastern coast, with scandent, half-climbing, somewhat spiny branches and small, glossy, faintly triangular leaves. The habit falls between shrub and vine, so the plant can be left to mound and tangle or trained up a fence or arbor, and the fine, dark, semi-evergreen foliage gives a handsome year-round texture in the mild coastal gardens where the species thrives.

Few shrubs are so tied to a particular ground. The shellmound buckthorn grows only on lime-rich soils and turns up, again and again, on coastal shell mounds and old Indian middens, those ancient heaps of oyster shell that sweeten the soil with calcium along the coast from the Carolinas to Mississippi. To find the plant in the wild is very often to be standing on a piece of human history, which gives the species an unusual archaeological resonance among garden shrubs.

In late summer and fall, from August into September, the branches carry a profusion of tiny five-petaled white flowers that are strongly and sweetly fragrant, an unexpected gift from so modest a plant, and a draw for bees and other late pollinators. The genus name honors the French official Augustin Sageret, and the epithet minutiflora simply means small-flowered, an honest description of the little blooms that scent the autumn air.

Though rare and seldom offered, the shellmound buckthorn makes an effective and unusual garden plant, trained on a fence or arbor, grown as an informal mounding shrub, or used as a fragrant, fine-textured screen in a warm, well-drained, lime-rich spot. The closely related Asian sweet plum, Sageretia theezans, is a classic bonsai subject, and this native cousin lends itself to the same treatment for a collector after something few others grow.