Baptisia megacarpa, the Apalachicola or bigpod wild indigo, is a rare and remarkable native of the floodplains and forested slopes of the Florida Panhandle, southeastern Alabama, and southwestern Georgia. The species grows on sandy ridges and stream terraces in the Chattahoochee River drainage, finely tuned to that particular corner of the South.
Baptisia sphaerocarpa, yellow wild indigo, is the sunny member of the wild indigo clan, a tough, rounded native perennial topped in spring with short, dense spikes of clear bright yellow, pea-like flowers over fresh blue-green foliage. Compact and shrubby, the plant brings strong color and structure to a sunny border.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine with bright trumpet flowers, and 'Helen Fredel' is a large-flowered selection in red-orange with a yellow throat, a shade between the old varieties 'Atrosanguinea' and 'Tangerine Beauty'. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine flowers heavily in early summer and again, more lightly, later, and shows to best effect on a fence, an arbor, or a trellis in sun or part shade.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine, and 'Tangerine Beauty' is the famous tangerine-orange selection, opening a spring blaze of bright orange, trumpet-shaped flowers and blooming again, more lightly, through the season. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine shows to best effect on a fence, a wall, or a trellis in sun or part shade, where the early trumpets draw hummingbirds in numbers.
Crossvine is a vigorous, semi-evergreen native climber that ascends by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, and var. atrosanguinea is the red one: where the typical crossvine flowers orange, this striking selection, introduced by Woodlanders, carries abundant deep red to red-purple trumpets, often over narrower, longer leaves. The flowers even smell faintly of mocha on a warm day.
Bouvardia ternifolia, the firecracker bush, is a compact, heat-loving shrub of the southwestern United States and Mexico, hung from late spring to frost with clusters of long, slender, scarlet-red tubular flowers. Few plants pull hummingbirds in like this one: the bright tubes are pitched exactly for their bills, and the bloom keeps coming through the hottest months when little else holds color.
The genus name says it: Callicarpa, from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, beautiful fruit, a genus named for exactly what it does. Callicarpa americana, the American beautyberry, is the southeastern native that gives the genus a calling card. From late August into November, the plant sets dense clusters of small drupes in a luminous magenta-purple, a color that registers as almost unreal in the late-summer landscape, somewhere between fuchsia and amethyst, with no real precedent among native fruits. The berries gather in tight whorls around the stem at every leaf node, all the way down the arching branches, so that a mature shrub in October looks less like a shrub bearing fruit than a ribbon of purple glass beads strung along the branches.
Hardiness
Zones 7–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, immune support
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
Everyone who grows the native beautyberry knows the plant by the autumn display: those improbable whorls of magenta-purple fruit circling every stem like something a florist arranged and forgot to bill for. 'Welch's Pink' is that plant, in a color the species was not supposed to have.
Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
Calycanthus floridus 'Athens', also circulated under the name 'Katherine', is a yellow-flowered selection of the Eastern sweetshrub, a deciduous native of the Southeastern woodlands long grown for fragrance, adaptability, and strange, many-tepaled flowers. Where the wild plant blooms a deep maroon, 'Athens' opens soft, buttery yellow, an unexpected and elegant turn on a familiar shrub.
Canna flaccida is the wild golden canna of the Southern coastal plain, a native perennial with the broad, light green, tropical-looking leaves of the genus and large soft yellow flowers held above them in summer. Where the heavy garden cannas read as bedding, this species keeps a looser, wilder grace, the petals thin and almost orchid-like, opening in the morning and lasting a day.
Carex flaccosperma, the blue wood sedge, is a clump-forming native of the Southeastern woodlands grown for cool, glaucous, blue to blue-green foliage. The blades are wide for a sedge, to half an inch, faintly quilted along the veins, and they catch the light with a soft powdery sheen that lifts a shaded planting where most greens recede.
Carya aquatica, the water hickory or bitter pecan, is a large native tree of the walnut family, reaching ninety feet and more in the wild. Across the American South the species dominates clay flats and the backwater ground near streams and rivers, reproducing aggressively by seed and by sprouts from roots and cut stumps, and forming a major part of the region's wetland forests, in part because the more marketable timber trees around the water hickory have so often been logged out.
Castanea pumila, the American chinquapin or Allegheny chinkapin, is a deciduous large shrub or small tree native to the eastern and southeastern United States. Long admired by rural foragers and old-time orchardists, this relatively rare native once flourished across the South, where children filled their pockets with the spiny burrs and the sweet, nutty treasure inside.
Buttonbush is a rounded, deciduous native shrub, easily trained as a small multi-stemmed tree, grown for the curious globe-shaped flowers that give the plant its name. From early summer into fall, creamy-white pincushion balls about an inch across stud the branches, each a sphere of tiny tubular flowers with projecting styles that lend a fireworks effect, intensely fragrant and alive with bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Hardiness
Zones 5–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, general wellness, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications
Leatherleaf is the quiet constant of the northern bog. Chamaedaphne calyculata, the only species in the genus, is a low, thicket-forming evergreen of the heath family that ranges right around the cold northern world, from the peatlands of North America east to the bogs of Finland and Japan, and southward in this country to the pocosins and acid bogs of the coastal plain, as far as South Carolina. Across that vast range, leatherleaf forms the dense, spreading colonies that hold a bog together and shelter the wildlife within.
Among ornamental grasses, Chasmanthium latifolium is the rare one that thrives in shade. River oats, also called northern sea oats and inland sea oats, is a clumping, rhizomatous perennial grass of the eastern and central United States, found in the wild along wooded creek banks, river bottoms, and shaded slopes from Pennsylvania south to Florida and west toward the prairies. The broad, bamboo-like blades are wider than most grasses can claim, and the plant carries them in a loose, arching mound that takes deep shade without sulking.
The turtlehead is named twice over for things that go quiet. The genus Chelone is the Greek word for tortoise, after a nymph who mocked the marriage of Zeus and Hera and was turned, for her insolence, into a creature that carries her house and holds her tongue; one look at the flower, a hinged, swollen, pink-and-gaping thing that seems about to either speak or bite, and you see why the name stuck. The species honors John Lyon, the Scottish plant hunter who worked the southern Appalachians in the footsteps of Bartram and Michaux. Lyon collected this turtlehead somewhere in the mountains around 1812 without recording quite where, noting only in his catalog that here was a new species, and a beautiful one; his friend Frederick Pursh later pinned Lyon's name to the plant. Lyon did not have long to enjoy the honor, dying in 1814 in the same southern mountains that had made his name. The plant has fared better. Chelone lyonii grows wild along streambanks and seeps in the high southern Appalachians, and 'Hot Lips' is the selection that turned the color up, deeper rose-pink flowers over foliage that emerges with a bronze cast. The flowers arrive in late summer and run into fall, which is the real gift, holding color in the moist and shaded corners just as the rest of the garden tires. Only a bumblebee is strong enough to force the blooms open, so a planting in flower comes with a low percussion of bees muscling in and backing out. Give them wet feet and a little shade and there is very little that does a damp, difficult spot this gracefully, or this late.
The native fringetree is one of the great small trees of the southern spring. Chionanthus virginicus, a deciduous large shrub or small tree, often multi-stemmed, hangs the whole canopy with fleecy, drooping panicles of narrow white petals in spring, soft as torn paper and lightly fragrant, a look that earned the old country names old man's beard and grancy graybeard. On female plants the flowers give way to clusters of raisin-sized, deep blue-purple fruits that birds take quickly.
