Carolina jessamine is the state flower of South Carolina and one of the most beloved evergreen vines of the South, prized for the wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that opens the gardening year. 'Margarita' is the cold-hardy answer to that beauty, a selection that carries the same sweet-scented gold well north of where the species usually gives out.
In the dappled understory of the Eastern woods, Geranium maculatum has made a home for as long as the forests have stood. Known to generations as wild geranium or cranesbill, this native perennial forms a tidy clump of softly lobed leaves and lifts loose sprays of rose-purple, five-petaled flowers, as much a part of the old spring landscape as dogwood and trillium.
Some plants elevate the familiar into the extraordinary, and Gordonia lasianthus 'Variegata' does exactly that, taking the quiet majesty of the native loblolly bay and dressing it in a silken fringe of cream. The glossy green leaves are edged in irregular strokes of ivory, as though touched by the brush of some moonlit painter in the pine woods, and the whole shrub glimmers softly through every season.
Grevillea 'Canberra Gem' is a bold and unusual Australian evergreen, a hybrid of Grevillea juniperina and Grevillea rosmarinifolia that brings fine texture, vivid color, and a touch of the exotic to an adventurous garden. The narrow, needle-like foliage is often mistaken for a conifer, until late winter, when the shrub reveals a true identity in a profusion of rose-red, spider-like flowers that spill from the branches and catch the eye clear across the garden.
Grevillea rosmarinifolia is a fine-textured Australian evergreen, a rounded to semi-prostrate shrub whose narrow, deep green leaves look uncannily like rosemary, giving the plant both the species name and a handsome, needled presence the year round. The likeness is only skin-deep, for this is a member of the protea family, Proteaceae, worlds away from any herb.
Carolina silverbell is one of the loveliest of the small native trees of the Southern woods, a deciduous tree of the southeastern United States that lights the spring understory with hundreds of little white bells. In April and May, before or as the leaves unfold, the branches hang thick with clusters of nodding, bell-shaped white flowers, an effect much like a flowering dogwood but softer, and just as welcome at the woodland edge.
In spring, the bare gray branches of the two-wing silverbell fill with small white bells, three to six to a cluster, hanging along the year-old wood like a run of tiny lanterns. Each flower is a half-inch, four-lobed cup, and en masse they turn a modest understory tree into one of the quiet highlights of the southern woodland spring. This silverbell grows as a large multi-stemmed shrub or a small tree, rarely more than thirty feet, with an open, layered frame that lets light through to whatever grows below.
Of all the silverbells, this is the one plant hunters remember. Halesia diptera var. magniflora is the large-flowered form of the two-wing silverbell, and the difference is not subtle: the white, bell-shaped flowers run half again larger than the type, sometimes an inch and more across, with the lobes cut so deeply that each bloom flares open like a little white star rather than a closed bell. In full flower, before the leaves are fully out, the branches all but vanish beneath them, and a mature specimen becomes a cloud of white in the April woods.
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
Firebush earns the name honestly. From late spring until the first frost, the arching branch tips carry tight clusters of slender tubular flowers in hot orange-red, each one a narrow torch held out for the hummingbirds and butterflies that work the plant from morning to dusk. The foliage plays along: new leaves and stems flush bronze to burgundy, the veins stained red, so that even between flushes of bloom the whole shrub reads warm. Few plants pull in as much winged traffic through the heat of a southern summer.
Few flowers announce themselves the way white ginger lily does after dark. Through late summer and early fall, the tall leafy stems open dense terminal spikes of pure white flowers, each bloom shaped like a hovering butterfly with a small yellow-green stain at the throat, and each one throwing a rich, sweet perfume that carries across a warm garden in the evening air. The scent is jasmine-deep and unmistakable, the reason the flowers are gathered for perfume and personal adornment across the tropics.
Heimia salicifolia is an airy, fine-textured shrub that carries a surprising amount of history in a modest frame. Slender willow-like leaves clothe the arching stems, and from midsummer into fall small, bright yellow, five-petaled flowers open in the leaf axils all along the branches, each followed by a little dry seed capsule. The overall effect is light and gauzy, a soft yellow haze rather than a bold splash, and the plant grows fast and multi-branched into a rounded, four-to-eight-foot mound.
The name does the plant no favors. "Swamp sunflower" conjures boggy ground and standing water, which is where you find the plant in the wild, yes, but not where you need to plant this sunflower in the garden. Helianthus angustifolius tolerates wet soils in nature because wet soils are where the plant manages to grow without being outcompeted. Given good sun and average garden moisture, the sunflower performs considerably better and needs no drainage problem to justify a place. The name is a provenance note, not a planting instruction.
Helianthus verticillatus is a sunflower you grow as much for the story as the flower, though the flower holds up on merit. The plainest field mark is the leaves: narrow, lance-shaped, and arranged in distinct whorls of three or four around the stem rather than in the usual opposite or alternate pairs, a tidy structural signature that names the plant and sets the species apart from every common sunflower. Tall and strong-stemmed, the plant rises six to ten feet and lifts open clusters of clear yellow, dark-centered flowers in late summer and early fall.
The Lenten rose is not a rose at all, but a member of the buttercup tribe that happens to flower around Lent, in the raw weeks of late winter when the garden is otherwise bare. The blooms are nodding cups a couple of inches across, held just above the foliage in white, cream, pink, plum, and a smoky green, many of them freckled or veined at the throat. What look like petals are in fact sepals, which is the secret of the long show: rather than dropping in days, the flowers hold for weeks and age slowly to green, carrying color from late winter well into spring.
Red yucca is one of those plants that looks like architecture and behaves, in the best sense, like a weed, thriving on neglect while holding a clean sculptural shape all year. From a low rosette of slender, arching, blue-gray leaves, each edged with curling white threads, the plant throws tall, wiry flower wands to four or five feet through the warm months, hung with dangling tubular blooms in coral-pink to deep red. Hummingbirds find the flowers almost the moment they open, and the bloom carries from late spring well into fall.
Redwing is grown less for the flowers than for what follows them. Through the warm months this fast, twining, semi-woody climber carries loose clusters of small clear-yellow flowers along the stems, pretty enough in passing, but the real event comes after, when each pollinated bloom ripens into a bright red winged fruit, a samara built exactly like the spinning key of a maple. In quantity the red keys smother the vine and glow against the small, neat foliage, an unexpected and long-lasting display that few visitors can name.
Pineland hibiscus is the wilder, pricklier cousin among the native mallows, and all the more charming for a slightly untamed look. Through the summer the plant opens broad flowers several inches across in soft creamy yellow, each centered on a deep maroon eye, the classic hibiscus form scaled down and set on a low, spreading, bristly frame. The deeply lobed leaves are rough to the touch and the stems carry fine prickles, so the whole plant reads as a hardy native of open, sunny ground rather than a pampered border hybrid.
