Most of the summersweets drop their leaves and sleep through winter; Clethra pringlei keeps them. This Mexican member of the clan is a broad-leaved evergreen, a large, slow-growing shrub or small tree from the mountain woodlands of northeastern Mexico, and one of the more surprising plants in the genus for a gardener who knows only the deciduous American kinds.
The summersweets are among the most fragrant of American shrubs, and the southern woolly summersweet, Clethra tomentosa, carries the whole tribe's gifts: colonies of upright stems in moist, acid ground, and terminal spikes of white flowers that pour a honey-and-clove perfume across the July garden. Country people knew the plant as Sweet Pepperbush, for the peppercorn seed heads, and the crushed flowers even raise a soft lather once used as a woodland soap.
Cliftonia monophylla 'Berry Pink' is a rare, pink-flowered selection of the Black Titi, a native evergreen shrub or small tree of the southeastern coastal plain that normally blooms in white. The species haunts the acid bogs, pond margins, and titi swamps from the Carolinas to the Gulf, where the early flowers make the buckwheat tree one of the first and most important nectar sources of the southern year, the source of the prized titi honey.
Clinopodium coccineum is a small, aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family, native to the deep, well-drained sands of the southeastern coastal plain, from Mississippi and Georgia down into Florida. The loose, open frame and small, spicy-scented leaves would earn a quiet place on their own, but the flowers are the event: showy scarlet tubes carried over a long summer season, held out like little trumpets that hummingbirds cannot resist.
'Amber Blush' is a soft-toned selection of the native scarlet calamint, Clinopodium coccineum, an aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family from the deep sands of the southeastern coastal plain. Where the wild species flowers in hot scarlet, this apricot clone brings a gentler, more complicated color to the same tough, hummingbird-loved plant.
Clinopodium coccineum 'Ohoopee Yellow' wears a contradictory name, since this is a clear, bright yellow-flowered form of a mint shrub that usually blooms in scarlet. The yellow form was originally shared with us by Ken Wurdak, who found the plant in Tattnall County, Georgia. We later lost our stock and got the clone back from Mike Creel, who had received starts from us years before. Such are plant sagas.
Clinopodium georgianum is a low, aromatic shrublet of the mint family, prized for highly scented foliage and clouds of pinkish-lavender flowers in late summer and fall, when much of the garden is winding down. Georgia savory makes a fine edging or front-of-border plant for sunny or lightly shaded spots with good drainage, and unlike most of the tribe, this southern native will grow in heavier soils as well as sand.
Clytostoma callistegioides is one of those vines that feels as though the plant wandered out of an old botanical expedition: vigorous, evergreen, and brimming with the sort of charm collectors once crossed oceans to find. A close relative of our native crossvine (Bignonia capreolata), this South American cousin shares the same athletic climbing spirit but dresses in glossier, more refined foliage and carries larger flowers.
Colquhounia coccinea is a showy, soft-wooded shrub of the mint family, clothed in medium-sized leaves that are downy and pleasantly rough to the touch. Through late summer and fall come dense terminal spikes of orange-scarlet, yellow-throated flowers, a hot late-season color that hummingbirds and pollinating insects work eagerly. Plant in a sunny, well-drained site with good soil, where the arching stems can be trained against a warm wall.
The conradinas are dense, aromatic, low shrubs of the mint family, dressed in small, usually needle-like green or gray leaves and hung with little pale purple flowers. Six or seven species grow wild in the southern United States, most of them in Florida on sand or very sandy soil, and all but this one (and one possibly new species) are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Conradina canescens is the common, widespread member of the clan, a somewhat variable plant of the Gulf Coast dunes of northwest Florida and adjacent Alabama.
Conradina canescens 'Gray Mound' is a silver-leaved selection of the false rosemary that grows wild on the deep, pine-fringed sands of the northern Gulf Coast, in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle, where the species once mingled with sea oats and longleaf pine. A member of the mint family, this aromatic shrub carries soft, needle-like foliage in a ghostly silver-gray, and from spring into early summer, sometimes again in the cool of fall, offers a flush of pale lavender to bluish, two-lipped flowers that native bees and butterflies work eagerly.
Some years ago we introduced two selections of Conradina collected on the Styx River in southern Alabama, called 'Low Gray' and 'Low Green', and we hope those clones survive in cultivation somewhere still. On a return visit to the Styx River site we gathered several more cuttings from distinctly low-growing plants. This conradina haunts a sandy woodland and cutover near the Styx River, and may well represent a new, as yet undescribed species; what appears to be the same plant turns up some miles east on Blackwater State Forest in northwest Florida. The Styx River plant differs clearly from the taller, more upright Conradina canescens of the open Gulf Coast.
A small shrub of the Cumberland Plateau, found only on the flood-scoured cobble and sand bars of three river systems in eastern Tennessee and a sliver of Kentucky: the Big South Fork of the Cumberland, the Caney Fork, and the Obed. The rest of the Conradina clan keeps to the sand scrub of Florida and the Gulf Coast of Alabama, sun-baked and semitropical. This species took a different path, north into the cooler uplands, and the cold-hardiness that came with the move is the gift to gardens farther north.
Native to the open prairies and meadows of North America, Coreopsis lanceolata, the lanceleaf coreopsis, has long been admired for bright, golden-yellow blooms and an easy, hardy nature. This perennial wildflower has been a staple of North American landscapes for a very long time, growing across a wide range of climates and soils, from sandy coastal ground to the rich prairies of the Midwest.
Coreopsis verticillata, the threadleaf coreopsis, is a clump-forming native perennial dressed in fine, thread-like foliage and covered through the long weeks of summer in small, bright yellow, daisy-like flowers. Native to the open woods and clearings of the eastern United States, threadleaf coreopsis has become one of the most popular of all garden perennials, an easy, airy, long-blooming plant for the sunny border.
Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood, is the beloved understory tree of the eastern North American woods, widely planted for the great show of white spring bracts (the true flowers are the small green knot at the center), and, in selections like this one, pink. A deciduous woodland tree that grows in moist, well-drained soil in sun or high, dappled shade, the dogwood rewards careful planting: set the root flare high, and never plant too deep.
There is a version of the flowering dogwood almost nobody has met. Cornus florida 'Suwanee Squat' was found in Suwannee County, Florida, by Bob Simons, a forest ecologist who spent half a century protecting the wild hardwood country of north Florida. As a young man in the early 1970s he walked a mixed-hardwood hammock outside Gainesville, decided the place was worth saving, and talked ten landowners and the state into making it San Felasco Hammock; that became the pattern of his life. A man who knew that kind of forest the way most of us know our own street is exactly the sort to notice a dogwood doing something a dogwood is not supposed to do. Woodlanders introduced his low, sprawling oddity to cultivation, and the plant has stayed scarce ever since, the kind of tree you mostly hear about secondhand from someone who saw one and never got over it.
This elegant small tree carries a graceful, vase-shaped habit that rounds out with age. Blooming two to three weeks after Cornus florida, the kousa dogwood opens striking, pointed flower bracts in late spring to early summer, extending the dogwood season. The bracts surround clusters of tiny true flowers in a star-like display that sets this dogwood apart.
This Chinese dogwood is a spreading, small to medium deciduous tree with clean foliage and showy white-bracted flowers. Unlike the native American flowering dogwood, the bracts are sharply pointed. The tree flowers about a month later than Cornus florida, and is apparently immune or resistant to some of the disease problems that trouble Cornus florida in certain areas. A fine ornamental for an open, semi-shady lawn or border.
Crataegus harbisonii is a small, thorny, deciduous hawthorn with unusually large leaves for the genus, white spring flowers, and red fall fruit. Behind that modest description stands one of the rarest trees in North America: Harbison's hawthorn was perhaps once fairly common around central Tennessee, but is now all but extinct in the wild.
