Dianella tasmanica 'Variegata' is a strappy evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage: arching, sword-shaped leaves boldly striped in white and green that stay dense and upright through the season and lend crisp, year-round structure to a bed. In spring and early summer, airy panicles of small, star-shaped, blue to violet flowers rise on wiry stems above the leaves, followed by glossy, deep blue berries that gleam against the pale striping, an unusual and long-lasting ornamental touch that gives the plant a second season of interest.
Few garden shrubs carry a resume like Dichroa febrifuga. In the ground this is a handsome, medium evergreen with lacecap heads of small blue flowers in late spring and, better still, clusters of berries in fall that ripen to an almost unreal iridescent, metallic blue, the kind of structural color usually reserved for beetles and tropical birds. A relatively recent introduction from China, the plant sits close enough to Hydrangea, in the family Hydrangeaceae, that the same trick applies: acidic soil deepens the flowers and fruit to true blue, while alkaline ground pushes them toward pink.
The genus name comes from the Greek dichroos, meaning "two-colored," and Dichroa versicolor presses the idea further: bloom color shifts with soil chemistry much the way a hydrangea does, swinging from deep cobalt to soft mauve depending on how much aluminum a plant can draw up. The species epithet versicolor only doubles down on the point, promising a shrub that refuses to settle on a single shade.
Dicliptera suberecta is a member of the acanthus family, Acanthaceae, and hails from the grasslands of Uruguay and Argentina, a heritage that shows in a love of heat, sun, and lean soil. Gardeners know the plant by two names that between them tell the whole story: Uruguayan firecracker plant, for the volley of tubular blooms, and hummingbird plant, for the traffic those blooms draw.
The genus name Dietes comes from the Greek for "having two relatives," a botanist's nod to the plant's kinship with both Iris and Moraea, near neighbors in the iris family. The species epithet bicolor means simply two-colored, for the soft yellow petals brushed with a dark thumbprint at the base. Between the two words, the whole plant is named for doubleness: two kin, two colors.
The botanical name reads like a compliment: Diospyros joins the Greek dios, divine, to pyros, grain, so the genus translates roughly as "fruit of the gods," a lofty title for a tree that drops sweet, homely orange fruit onto the forest floor each autumn. The common name travels the other direction, plain and American, from the Powhatan word putchamin for a dried fruit, a reminder that Native peoples were drying persimmons into cakes long before the botanists arrived.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
55–60 ft.
Spread
30–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Distylium myricoides is an evergreen member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, and a quiet cousin to the fragrant winter witch-hazels, though the family resemblance hides in the flowers rather than the leaves. The genus name comes from the Greek for "two styles," for the paired styles at the heart of each small bloom, while the species epithet myricoides means "resembling Myrica," the bayberries, a nod to the narrow, leathery foliage.
Distylium myricoides belongs to the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, an evergreen cousin of the fragrant winter witch-hazels, though the kinship shows in the flowers rather than the leaves. The Piroche form is a distinct, low-slung selection of the species, chosen for a broad, spreading habit and strong horizontal branching that make the plant read more as living groundwork than as an upright shrub.
Distylium racemosum is the type species of the genus and the most tree-like of the isu trees, an evergreen member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae. The genus name comes from the Greek for "two styles," for the paired styles at the center of each small flower, while the species epithet racemosum notes the short racemes along which those flowers are held.
This large growing fern is an uncommon native to swamps in the southern U.S. It has bold evergreen fronds. This rare fern is a great garden plant for rich moist soil in shady or semi-shady sites.
Dryopteris cycadina (D. atrata) is an easy-to-grow evergreen garden fern. The stiff leathery pinnate fronds make a good show in the shady or semi-shady woodland garden or along the shady side of a wall or building. .
The autumn fern, Dryopteris erythrosora, earns the common name backward: the new fronds arrive in spring the color of turning leaves, a warm copper-orange that seems borrowed from October. As those fronds age they deepen through pink and bronze and finally settle into glossy dark green, so the plant carries a hint of autumn even at the height of the growing season.
There is a moment in early spring when a new frond of Dryopteris erythrosora 'Brilliance' unfurls, and the sight is one of the more quietly spectacular things a shade garden produces. The emerging fronds are a vivid copper-orange, almost metallic in certain light, deepening through pink and bronze before settling into the glossy dark green of maturity. 'Brilliance' is a selected form of the autumn fern chosen specifically for the intensity of that color progression, pushing the coppery new growth further than the straight species manages and holding the color longer. In a garden where most plants arrive already green, this is a meaningful distinction.
Dryopteris ludoviciana, the southern shield fern, is a bold, glossy evergreen native to the wet woodlands of the American South. The species epithet ludoviciana means "of Louisiana," a nod to the swampy bottomlands, blackwater hammocks, and shaded seeps where the fern grows wild, from Florida west to Texas and north through the Carolinas.
Dryopteris ×remota, the remote wood fern or scaly buckler fern, is one of those quiet accidents of nature that turns out better than anything a breeder set out to make. The fern is a naturally occurring hybrid between the scaly male fern, Dryopteris affinis, of western Europe and the British Isles, and the broad buckler fern, Dryopteris expansa, of cooler northern woods. From the affinis parent the hybrid took shaggy stalks thickly clothed in golden-brown scales; from expansa, the fine, lacy cut of the frond. The epithet remota, meaning scattered or spaced apart, points to the way the lowest segments stand a little distant from one another along the frond, a subtle tell that separates this fern from the crowd of look-alike wood ferns.
Dryopteris ×australis is a fern that cannot, strictly speaking, reproduce, and is all the more vigorous for the lack. This is a natural hybrid, thrown wherever two Southern wood ferns grow within a spore’s reach of one another: the log fern, Dryopteris celsa, and the southern wood fern, Dryopteris ludoviciana. The cross comes out sterile, setting spores that never amount to anything, so the fern cannot seed itself across a bed the way a large fern usually will. Every plant in cultivation traces back by division to a wild clump found somewhere between Virginia and Louisiana, the greatest number of them in Alabama.
Golden dewdrop, Duranta erecta, is a member of the verbena family grown across the warm world for two ornaments the shrub carries at once: loose, drooping sprays of soft lilac-blue flowers, each with a darker eye, and long chains of round, glossy amber berries that hang like strings of wet gold. The common name catches that second gift exactly, while older names, pigeon berry and skyflower, catch the first. Native from Mexico and the Caribbean through much of tropical South America, the shrub has been carried into gardens throughout the subtropics, where the plant flowers and fruits nearly year round.
Duranta serratifolia, the tala blanco of northern Argentina, is a South American cousin of the familiar golden dewdrop and belongs, like all Duranta, to the verbena family. The species epithet serratifolia means saw-toothed leaf, for the finely serrated margins that separate this plant from the smoother-leaved dewdrops. In the wild the shrub grows through the dry forests and thorn scrub of the Argentine northwest, where the common name, roughly white tala, sets the plant among the talas, the spiny native trees and shrubs that give those woodlands their character.
Oblongleaf twinflower, Dyschoriste oblongifolia, is a low, spreading wildflower of the American Southeast, a member of the acanthus family that carpets the dry pine flatwoods, sandhills, and open savannas of Florida and neighboring states. The common name comes from the habit of carrying the small, funnel-shaped flowers in pairs, twinned in the leaf axils along low stems, while the botanical epithet oblongifolia simply describes the neat, oblong leaves. An older regional name is snakeherb, a tag shared across the genus Dyschoriste.
Some plants are grown for beauty; a few are grown for the story of their survival, and Echinacea tennesseensis, the Tennessee coneflower, is one of the latter. Endemic to a handful of limestone cedar glades around Nashville, the species was once believed extinct, then rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century clinging to those thin, sun-baked soils. The Tennessee coneflower went on to become one of the first plants ever listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and after decades of protection and propagation was formally delisted in 2011, recovered. To grow this coneflower is to keep a small piece of that comeback going.
