A seldom-seen species with old-world charm, Abelia chinensis is a deciduous shrub native to China and one of the foundational parents of the widely grown Abelia x grandiflora. Far less common in American gardens than its hybrid offspring, the true species offers its own quiet distinctions: larger foliage, a fuller habit, and a long summer season of bloom that makes it a thoughtful choice for collectors and pollinator gardeners alike.
Abeliophyllum is a genus of a single species, first described from Korea in 1919 and grown in Western gardens since the 1930s, when it earned an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society. It belongs to the olive family beside lilac and forsythia, and in the wild it clings on at only a handful of Korean sites, where it is now protected by law as an endangered plant. This is the white-flowered species itself, the parent of the better-known pink form.
Abeliophyllum is a genus of exactly one species, a quiet distinction it has held since botanists first described it from Korea in 1919. It belongs to the olive family alongside lilac and true forsythia, and in the wild it survives at only a handful of sites in the Korean hills, where it is now protected by law as an endangered plant. By the 1930s it had reached gardens in Europe and North America and earned an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society, and collectors have cherished it ever since. 'Roseum' is the blush-pink form of that rarity.
Abelmoschus manihot wears two faces. To a flower gardener it is the Sunset Hibiscus, a fast tropical perennial that throws up large, pale-yellow blooms with a deep maroon eye all through the warm season, each one open for a day in the manner of its mallow kin. To much of the Pacific and tropical Asia it is something more fundamental: aibika, among the most important leafy vegetables in Papua New Guinea, grown in dooryards from New Guinea to Queensland and across into China and Japan.
Abutilon megapotamicum is the trailing one of the flowering maples, a slender, half-vining deciduous shrub that drapes and clambers rather than standing stiffly upright. Its species name means "of the big river," for the Rio Grande basin of southern Brazil where it grows wild, and like the rest of its tribe it belongs not to the maples its leaves suggest but to the mallow family, in company with hibiscus and hollyhock.
Two things the common names get wrong: it is not Chinese, and it is not a maple. Abutilon pictum comes from the warm river country of southern Brazil and its neighbors, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the maple lives only in the leaves, which are lobed and toothed enough to have fooled people into "flowering maple." It belongs instead to the mallow family, in good company with hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and it carries that resemblance in every five-petaled bloom.
Call it a flowering maple if you like, but there is not a drop of maple in it. Abutilon pictum belongs to the mallow family, alongside hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and only the lobed, maple-shaped leaves account for the nickname. What the leaves of 'Souvenir de Bonn' actually do is carry a wide, irregular margin of cream around their green, a variegation bold enough to earn the plant its place on looks alone. The flowers settle the matter. All season they dangle from the branches like small paper lanterns, apricot to salmon, each bell veined through with crimson, swinging on thin stalks where the hummingbirds find them. 'Souvenir de Bonn' is among the oldest abutilons still in gardens, a parlor plant out of the conservatory age, when a variegated flowering maple was the sort of thing one kept in a bright room through winter and carried out to the terrace each summer. The species hails from Brazil; the cultivar name is a keepsake of Bonn, a souvenir that outlasted whoever first carried it home. They are tender, frost being their one real enemy, and in our climate they may sail through a mild winter outdoors or die to the ground and return from the root. Either way they earn their keep, blooming spring to frost and beyond, asking only for sun, rich soil, and water enough to keep the show going. Set them where you pass close, on a patio or against a warm wall, where the lanterns can be read at eye level.
Set aside the family reputation. Acacia angustissima is the polite, thornless cousin in a clan better known for its armament, a soft green presence where you might brace for spines. Botanists have since moved it to its own genus, Acaciella, but in the trade it keeps the old familiar name. It grows wild across the dry grasslands and open woods of the south-central United States down into Mexico and Central America, carrying itself like a small green fountain of fine, ferny, twice-divided foliage that filters the light rather than blocking it.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
4–5 ft.
Spread
4–5 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, pain relief, topical applications, general wellness
Espino is the thorn tree of the South American dry country, the signature shrub of central Chile's espinal, where it grows so thickly alongside the Chilean wine palm that it gives whole landscapes their character. Its range runs on through Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Spiny and twiggy, armed with stiff, pale, almost-white thorns, it is handsome from a distance and best handled with gloves. Botanists now file it under Vachellia, though the gardening world still knows it as Acacia caven.
Many of the finest ornamentals for the southern garden come from the deserts of the Southwest, and this Chihuahuan legume is a quietly handsome example. Acacia neovernicosa is an upright, spreading, thorny shrub clothed in twice-compound leaves so finely divided that the whole plant takes on a soft, smoky texture. The foliage carries a faint varnish, sticky to the touch, which gives the species both its botanical name and its common one, viscid acacia. In spring the branches are studded with small golden puffballs of bloom, abundant and sweetly fragrant, loud with bees on a warm morning.
Acacia visco, now placed by botanists in the genus Parasenegalia, is a graceful, fast-growing tree from the high country of northern Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, where it is known simply as visco or viscote. The name nods to the sticky, resinous sap the tree exudes. Unusually among its thorny relatives it is thornless, with a light, open crown of ferny, twice-divided leaves that cast a dappled, forgiving shade.
Acalypha pendula is a trailing, mat-forming little shrub grown for its curious flowers: soft, fuzzy, crimson catkins, three to four inches long, that hang like miniature chenille tails or a cat's tail among small green leaves. It is a dwarf cousin of the familiar chenille plant, and is sold under the common names dwarf chenille, firetail, and strawberry firetails.
Acanthus mollis is one of the great architectural plants of the garden, a clump-forming perennial whose large, glossy, deeply cut leaves are among the most recognizable of all foliage. They are, quite literally, the leaves of antiquity: their form was carved into the capitals of Corinthian columns by Greek and Roman builders, and the legend, told by Vitruvius, holds that the sculptor Callimachus took his inspiration from a clump of acanthus growing up around a basket left on a girl's grave. Few plants carry their history so plainly in their shape.
Acca sellowiana, the pineapple guava, is that rare plant that is handsome enough for the border and generous enough for the kitchen. It came to botanical notice through the German naturalist Friedrich Sellow, who collected it in southern Brazil in 1819, and it carries his name still; for years it was known, and is often still sold, as Feijoa sellowiana. Its true home is the subtropical highlands of southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, and from there it has traveled to warm gardens the world over.
Acer cissifolium is one of the trifoliate maples, a small deciduous tree whose leaves, divided into three coarsely toothed leaflets, look more like those of an ivy or a vine than of a maple, hence the common names ivy-leaved and vine-leaved maple. The species is native to the cool mountain forests of Japan, where these trees grow into an upright oval that broadens with age to a wide, rounded crown. Michael Dirr called the plant "extremely rare in cultivation but certainly worthy of consideration," and that judgment still holds.
Aconitum uncinatum, the southern blue monkshood, is an uncommon and long-lived native of the eastern United States, scattered through the Appalachians and Piedmont in rich, moist woods, along streambanks, and in cool seeps. The slender stems ascend and lean, sometimes weakly climbing to several feet, carrying lobed leaves and, in late summer into fall, terminal racemes of medium blue, hooded flowers held on long stalks. The cowl-shaped upper sepal gives the monkshoods their name, and few native wildflowers match this clean, late-season blue.
A medium-sized evergreen shrub still little known in cultivation, Adina pilulifera carries small, glossy leaves and, in midsummer, round white flower heads about an inch across, each bristling with protruding styles like a tiny Sputnik. The effect is curious and charming, a pincushion of white set among shining foliage, and the evergreen habit earns the shrub a place where the deciduous buttonbushes leave a winter gap.
A medium to large deciduous shrub closely related to the native buttonbush, Adina rubella wears smaller leaves and bears similar but daintier flowers: round, scented heads of pale pink and white, each bristling with styles into a small Sputnik, carried over a long season from early summer well into fall. The pincushion blooms draw bees and butterflies just as the buttonbushes do, and an open, arching habit gives the shrub a fine-textured grace.
In July, when most of the shade garden has settled into a holding pattern of foliage and waiting, Aesculus parviflora opens for business. The timing is the first surprise. The flowers are the second. Each panicle is a foot or more of tightly packed white tubular blooms with conspicuous pink-red anthers projecting beyond the petals, the whole spike held upright above the foliage like something assembled by a botanical committee that could not decide between elegant and extravagant and chose both. A mature colony in full bloom in midsummer is among the more spectacular events available to the shade gardener, and the hummingbirds and swallowtails arrive reliably.
A wide-spreading, suckering, multi-stemmed deciduous shrub of slow, deliberate growth, Aesculus parviflora var. serotina carries the same upright white bottlebrush flowers as the bottlebrush buckeye, but opens them two to three weeks later, well into the heat of summer. The overall shape is irregular and almost stratified, the branches layering horizontally, and the medium to dark green leaves turn a clear yellow in fall.
