A silver-blue jewel among native palms, this is the rare glaucous form of saw palmetto, the low fan palm that carpets the pine flatwoods and coastal plains of the Deep South. Most saw palmettos wear green leaves, but this selection, native chiefly to the east coast of Florida, holds fans of striking silvery blue, a metallic glaucous bloom that lifts the plant from a workhorse native to an ornamental of real presence.
Royal catchfly wears the most electric red in the native flora. Silene regia sends up leafy, upright stems two to four feet tall, topped in mid to late summer with loose clusters of brilliant scarlet, star-shaped flowers, each with five deeply notched petals. Few prairie plants flower in true red, and fewer hold that color through the heat of July and August, which makes this native a genuine standout.
Cup plant is a giant of the summer prairie, a statuesque perennial that rises on stout, square stems to eight feet or more and lifts a crown of bright yellow, daisy-like flowers above the border. The name comes from a quirk of the foliage: the large, coarse leaves are perfoliate, joined in pairs around the stem to form a shallow cup that catches and holds rainwater. Silphium perfoliatum belongs to the sunflower tribe of the aster family, Asteraceae, and shares that clan's generosity of bloom.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support, pain relief, digestive health
Sinojackia xylocarpa is a rare flowering treasure from the hills of eastern China, a deciduous small tree or large shrub that few gardeners have ever met. Known as the jacktree, the species belongs to the storax family, Styracaceae, a close cousin of the snowbells and silverbells, and carries the same poetry of spring: pendant, bell-shaped white flowers that dangle beneath arching branches like small antique lanterns swaying in a breeze.
Sisyrinchium nashii 'Suwannee', Nash's blue-eyed grass, is a small, enchanting native perennial of the Southeastern United States, selected from populations in Florida's Suwannee River basin. Despite the common name, this is no grass at all but a diminutive member of the iris family, Iridaceae, betraying the kinship in the fine, flattened, fan-arranged foliage and the six-parted, star-shaped flowers. The species honors George V. Nash, the American botanist who described so much of the Southeastern flora.
Blue-stemmed goldenrod is the goldenrod for shade. Where most of the clan demand open sun, Solidago caesia threads through the dappled light of the eastern woodland, arching slender, blue-purple stems that carry small, brilliant yellow flowers packed into the leaf axils, so the bloom runs the whole length of each stem like a garland. That habit gives the second common name, wreath goldenrod, and the late-summer to autumn color arrives just as the shade garden begins to fade.
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.
Stauntonia hexaphylla is a handsome, vigorous evergreen climber from the woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China, grown as much for glossy year-round foliage as for the famous fruit. The palmate leaves are cut into five to seven leathery, dark-green leaflets, held on a strong, twining vine that clothes a support densely from top to bottom. A member of the Lardizabalaceae, Stauntonia counts Akebia, the chocolate vine, and Decaisnea, the blue-sausage tree, as relatives.
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.
American snowbell is one of the quiet delights of the Southeastern wetlands, usually a graceful multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, though the plant can be trained up into a small single-trunked tree. Along streamsides and in low, wet ground from the coastal plain through the interior South, the shrub carries slender branches that hang, in spring, with rows of small, bell-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant and nodding on fine stalks so the whole plant seems trimmed in tiny lanterns.
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.
Styrax obassia, the fragrant snowbell, is the bold-leaved cousin of the more familiar Japanese snowbell, a small deciduous tree from the mountain woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China. Where Styrax japonicus hides small bells beneath fine, layered branches, the fragrant snowbell wears large, rounded, almost tropical leaves up to eight inches across, and hangs long, drooping chains of white, bell-shaped flowers that carry a sweet perfume through the late-spring garden.
In the open oak-hickory woodlands and fire-maintained savannas that once covered the upland South, Georgia aster was a fixture, a late-season native sending up violet-blue flowers in October and November at the precise moment when almost everything else had finished. That landscape is largely gone now, and the aster went with most of it.
A native aster with a regional accent. Most of the asters Americans plant are wide-ranging species that turn up from Maine to Texas and read essentially the same wherever they grow. Symphyotrichum grandiflorum is more particular, with a native range small and specific: the Atlantic Coastal Plain of Virginia and the Carolinas, plus the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and little more. A few hundred miles of sandy roadsides, dry pine-oak woods, abandoned fields, and forest edges from the Tidewater into the rolling country west of the fall line. For a gardener in the Carolinas or Georgia, this is one of the few asters that is genuinely here, a piece of the actual Atlantic Coastal Plain flora rather than a borrowed prairie species filling in for a missing native.
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.
Syringa meyeri 'Palibin', the dwarf Korean lilac, is a Southern-friendly lilac with old-world charm and clouds of spring fragrance. For gardeners who have long admired the lilac's perfume but found themselves too far south to grow one with confidence, this compact deciduous shrub offers the romance of the traditional lilacs, dense clusters of icy-pink to pale lavender bloom, without the northern fussiness.
Copper Canyon daisy is a big, aromatic, autumn-flowering marigold from the mountains of southern Arizona and adjacent northern Mexico, grown as much for the scent as the show. Brush against the finely divided, fern-like foliage and the plant releases a strong, distinctive fragrance, a mix of citrus, anise, and marigold that some find intoxicating and others frankly pungent. Tagetes lemmonii builds a soft, shrubby mound three to four feet high and wider still.
Tagetes lucida is the herb that does it all. Known as Mexican tarragon, Mexican mint marigold, pericón, and, in the old Aztec tongue, yauhtli, this fragrant perennial from Mexico and Central America earns every name. The narrow, glossy, deep-green leaves carry a warm anise-tarragon scent and flavor, and in late summer and fall the plant scatters small, single, golden-yellow marigold flowers across a tidy foot-and-a-half mound.
Imagine a shrub that looks like a conifer caught in an airy, pink-flowering daydream. Tamarix ramosissima, often called tamarisk or saltcedar, is a deciduous shrub or small tree with fine, scale-like leaves that read as cedar from ten feet away, yet drop in winter. That contradiction is the charm: conifer-like texture on a plant that is no conifer at all.
Cape honeysuckle is a rangy, vine-like evergreen shrub from southern Africa, grown for glossy, compound leaves like a trumpet vine's and, above all, for the showy clusters of orange to orange-red tubular flowers that hummingbirds and, in the wild, sunbirds cannot resist. A member of the trumpet-vine family, Bignoniaceae, the plant can be trained up a support, clipped into a loose informal hedge, or left to cascade over a wall or bank.
