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
'Arp' is the rosemary to grow where ordinary rosemary freezes out, the cold-hardiest of the common culinary rosemaries and a genuine boon to gardeners north of the herb's usual range. Selected in 1972 from a plant growing at Arp, in east Texas, by the noted herb grower Madalene Hill, this selection carries the same needle-like evergreen foliage, aromatic and useful in the kitchen, on a robust, bushy, upright frame, with the bonus of a distinct lemon note in the scent and a soft gray-green cast to the leaves.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
Among the upright rosemaries, 'Miss Jessopp's Upright' stands as the tall, columnar backbone of the herb garden, sending stiff, aromatic branches skyward in a narrow plume rather than the low sprawl of the creeping kinds. The cultivar carries the name of Euphemia Jessopp, an Edwardian gardener whose plant the great plantsman E. A. Bowles selected and passed into wider cultivation, and the shrub has been grown under her name for more than a century. Botanists have lately moved rosemary out of the old genus and into Salvia, so that the plant now answers to Salvia rosmarinus as often as to the familiar Rosmarinus officinalis, though gardeners and cooks are in no hurry to give up the older word.
Where the upright rosemaries reach for the sky, the Prostrate Rosemary lies down and flows, spilling in long, trailing, aromatic stems that pour over a wall, a bank, or the rim of a raised bed. The plant is the same species that flavors the Sunday roast, Rosmarinus officinalis, lately reclassified by botanists as Salvia rosmarinus, but grown here in a low, spreading form that trades the shrub's usual stiffness for a soft, cascading habit.
'Tuscan Blue' is the robust, broad-leaved aristocrat of the upright rosemaries, a fast, strongly vertical form grown as much for the deep blue flowers as for the kitchen. Thicker in leaf and richer in bloom than the common rosemary, the cultivar is the same Mediterranean herb, Rosmarinus officinalis, now moved by botanists into the genus Salvia as Salvia rosmarinus, though few cooks will trouble to relearn the name.
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.
Ruscus aculeatus, Butcher's Broom, is a low evergreen shrub of the asparagus family, native to the woodlands of southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, and reaching north into the milder parts of the British Isles. What look like glossy, spine-tipped leaves are not leaves at all but flattened stems called cladodes, which take over the work of photosynthesis while the true leaves are reduced to tiny scales. The generic name comes from the Latin ruscum, the old word for a butcher's broom, and the epithet aculeatus means prickled, for the sharp point that tips each cladode.
Ruscus aculeatus 'Wheeler's Variety' is a low, self-fruiting selection of Butcher's Broom, and the whole point of the plant is written into that phrase. The wild species is dioecious, needing a male and a female to set fruit, but 'Wheeler's Variety' is a hermaphroditic clone that carries perfect flowers and so ripens a heavy crop of scarlet berries entirely alone, with no partner required. For a gardener who wants the winter show from a single plant, this is the form to grow.
Sageretia theezans, the Chinese sweet plum, is a graceful evergreen shrub of the buckthorn family, native to southern China, where the plant grows to some three to eight feet with fine, zigzagging branches, small glossy leaves, and a handsome flaking, multicolored trunk. New growth often emerges bronze before settling to deep green, and in the mild-winter gardens that suit the species the foliage holds the year round, giving a dense, fine-textured presence rare in so tough a plant.
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.
Salix eriocephala, the heart-leaved or Missouri River willow, is a graceful native shrub, sometimes a modest multi-stemmed tree, of riverbanks and wet meadows across northern and eastern North America. The plant rises on several trunks clad in coarse gray bark, reaching roughly eight to a dozen feet in the garden and more in wild thickets, and the epithet eriocephala, meaning woolly-headed, points to the soft, silky catkins that give the willow much of its charm.
Salix integra 'Hakuro Nishiki', the dappled willow, is an elegant small willow grown above all for the show its new growth makes in spring. As the shoots unfold, the glossy leaves emerge splashed and mottled in pink and creamy white, so freely that the whole plant reads as a soft cloud of blossom-pink from a distance, before the variegation settles to green and white through summer. The Japanese cultivar name, roughly white-dappled brocade, catches the effect exactly.
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.
Salix nigra, the black willow, is the largest native willow of North America and a common deciduous tree of Southern wetlands, but 'Webb' is a strikingly different, vase-shaped form that gathers those loose, streamside branches into a small, dense, upright tree. The habit sets the selection apart at once, tidy and shapely where the wild black willow sprawls, while keeping all the toughness and easy water-loving vigor of the species.
Salix tristis is a dwarf, gray-leaved native willow and one of the most surprising members of a genus most gardeners picture standing knee-deep in water. This small, tidy shrub was originally collected by Woodlanders in Jefferson County, Florida, where the plant grew in pine flatwoods on well-drained, even dry, sandy sites, the opposite of the streambank home most willows keep. The soft, grayish, woolly-hairy leaves and neat, low frame set the willow apart at a glance.
Salvia melissodora, the grape-scented sage, is a woody Mexican shrub grown for a scent as much as a flower, since the small lavender-blue blooms carry an unmistakable perfume of grape soda that drifts on warm air. Native to the Sierra Madre from Chihuahua south to Oaxaca, at four to eight thousand feet, the plant flowers in long spikes from late spring right through to frost, an exceptionally long and fragrant season.
Salvia microphylla 'Lutea' is an uncommon yellow-flowered form of the littleleaf or baby sage, a small woody shrub of the mountains of Mexico and the borderlands. Where the species carries the usual salvia scarlet or orange-red, 'Lutea' opens soft, pale yellow flowers instead, a quiet and unusual color on a plant otherwise known for hot tones, and blooms over a long season from late spring into fall.
Salvia microphylla 'Deltoid' is a shrubby form of the littleleaf or baby sage grown for warm salmon-coral flowers and neat, triangular, deltoid leaves. The small tubular blooms open over a long season and read as a soft coral against the fine, glossy foliage, a gentler tone than the hot scarlet of many littleleaf sages.
Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' is the famous temperature-shifting bicolor of the littleleaf sages, and the trick is worth the fame. In the cool of spring the flowers may open pure white or pure red, but as summer heat builds they turn strikingly two-tone, white below with a bold red lip, so that a single plant can carry white, red, and red-and-white flowers all at once. The show runs from late spring until frost.
