Every nursery keeps a few mysteries, and this trailing evergreen euonymus is one of ours: a plant still awaiting a firm name, possibly Euonymus aculeatus, collected by Frank Bell high on Mount Emei (Emeishan) in Sichuan, China. Low and spreading, the stems carry long-pointed, finely toothed leaves about two inches long, glossy and evergreen, on a habit that hugs the ground and wanders steadily outward.
This very rare aster, now placed in the genus Eurybia, is a true Florida endemic, native only to the moist pine flatwoods of the lower Apalachicola River. The plant is a botanical oddity: the clumping, foot-tall foliage is narrow, stiff, and grass-like, so unlike the leafy stems of an ordinary aster that a passerby might take the clump for a tuft of sedge. From late spring into early summer, slender flower stems rise above the leaves carrying clusters of inch-wide lavender-purple daisies, each ringing a small yellow eye.
The limequat was born of catastrophe. After the twin freezes of 1894 and 1895 laid waste to Florida's groves, Walter T. Swingle of the United States Department of Agriculture set out to breed citrus that could shrug off a cold snap, and in 1909 he crossed the sharp little West Indian or Key lime (Citrus aurantifolia) with the round Marumi kumquat (Fortunella japonica). Named and introduced in 1913 alongside a sister seedling called Lakeland, the Eustis limequat stands among the first successful intergeneric citrus hybrids, living proof that two separate genera could be wedded and still bear generous fruit.
Exbucklandia populnea is a rare evergreen tree that fools nearly everyone who meets it. The large, glossy, leathery leaves, sometimes shallowly three-lobed and carried on long stalks, look for all the world like those of a tulip poplar, yet the tree belongs to the witch-hazel family, a kinship few would ever guess. Bold and architectural, with bronze-red new growth and curious upright stipules capping each shoot, this is a foliage tree of real presence.
Pearlbush is named for the week before the show rather than the show itself. Along each slender arching branch, the flower buds swell into round, hard, pure white beads strung out in a line, and for a few days in very early spring the shrub looks convincingly like a plant hung with pearls. Then the buds open into cupped white flowers an inch or so across, six to ten of them to a raceme, and the whole irregular upright frame of eight to ten feet goes white at a point in the year when almost nothing else has started. The plant is sure to attract attention in flower, and does very well in the South, where pearlbush is a dependable herald of spring.
The American beech is one of the great presences of the eastern woods, a large, slow-growing deciduous tree that ranges through rich forests from southern Canada to the Gulf. Toothed oval leaves, several inches long, emerge a clean bright green, turn clear yellow in fall and then a warm russet-brown, and cling to the branches through much of winter, a habit called marcescence that gives the bare woods a soft papery whisper. The trunk is the signature: smooth, silver-gray, and elephantine, so inviting that generations have carved their initials into the living bark, a temptation best resisted since the wounds never truly heal.
Few fruits carry the weight of centuries quite like the common fig. Ficus carica, native to the sun-soaked hills of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, has graced gardens and tables since biblical times, and no member of the tribe is more beloved in the American South than 'Celeste', the little fig so sweet that growers have long called the tree the Sugar Fig.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
8–15 ft.
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
We are identifying this little-known fig as Ficus heterophylla thanks to Tony Avent of Plant Delights, who was most likely the source of the cuttings we originally started with. The species name means different leaves, and the plant lives up to the promise: juvenile foliage may be lobed and wandering in outline, while the mature leaves settle into dark green, pointed, slightly heart-shaped blades carried on handsome red petioles. A faint sweetness hangs about the shrub, and the long, almost vine-like branches lend the whole plant a loose, scrambling grace.
Ficus nipponica is a handsome evergreen climbing fig from Japan and temperate East Asia, a self-clinging vine that dresses walls, masonry, and tree trunks in glossy green the year round. Where the familiar creeping fig, Ficus pumila, carries small rounded leaves, this rarer relative bears larger, more pointed foliage and a somewhat tougher constitution. Botanists now file the plant under the sprawling Ficus sarmentosa complex, as Ficus sarmentosa var. nipponica, though it remains best known to gardeners by the older name.
Figvine is very unlike the common edible fig (Ficus carica). This evergreen climber wears small, fingernail-sized rounded leaves and is most often seen scaling masonry walls, where a fringe of tiny aerial rootlets grips the roughest stone and brick. Given time, the creeping fig will trace a wall in intricate green patterns or blanket the surface entirely in a flat, dense sheet, one of the finest self-clinging covers for a shaded or partly shaded wall in a warm garden.
In the forests of the Himalayan foothills and across monsoon Asia grows a fig of ancient bearing, Ficus roxburghii, known to botanists today as Ficus auriculata and to gardeners as the elephant-ear fig. This is no dainty exotic. In the tropics the plant makes a bold small tree; in the American South, where hard frost cuts back the top, the fig returns from the root each year as a heroic perennial, with a presence as memorable as a live oak draped in Spanish moss.
The Latin gives away the joke before you have even seen the plant. Ficus vaccinioides, the Formosan creeping fig, is a fig that has decided to impersonate a blueberry: vaccinioides means resembling Vaccinium, and the small, glossy, obovate leaves running close along reddish stems really could pass for an evergreen huckleberry. They are no relation at all. They are a true fig, latex and all, just one that has shrunk to a few inches tall and given up any ambition of climbing.
Fokienia hodginsii is the only living species in the genus, a conifer that looks assembled from parts of several others. The flattened, fanning sprays read as arborvitae from across a lawn. Up close, the scale leaves show chalky white bands on their undersides and the small round cones sit closer to Chamaecyparis and Calocedrus. Botanists have argued about where the tree belongs for more than a century and have not finished. Plants of the World Online still accepts the name Fokienia hodginsii, while several recent phylogenetic studies nest the genus inside Chamaecyparis and would have the tree called Chamaecyparis hodginsii. We keep the older name because that is what the plant is known and traded by, and both are defensible depending on whose treatment you follow.
Fontanesia is one of those quiet shrubs that rewards a close look and a little curiosity. A deciduous member of the olive family, Oleaceae, and a near relative of the privets, the plant carries narrow, lanceolate, opposite leaves several inches long on a fine, twiggy frame, and shares the easy, adaptable constitution that makes the privets so obliging in difficult ground.
Swamp privet, Forestiera acuminata, is a native deciduous shrub or small tree of the wet South, at home in the flood-prone bottoms and streambanks from Texas east to South Carolina and up the Mississippi Valley as far as Illinois and Indiana. A member of the olive family, Oleaceae, and a distant cousin of the true privets, the plant shrugs off standing water and seasonal flooding with an ease few woody plants can match.
Forestiera angustifolia 'Weeping' is a distinctive pendulous form of the Texas desert olive, an intricately branched native shrub whose cascading, weeping branches make it a living piece of sculpture. Fine and twiggy, clothed in small narrow leaves, the plant drapes and tumbles in a way the wild shrub never does, and reveals a fine tracery of branches in winter once the leaves have fallen. Tough as the Texas brush country that bore it, this is a plant grown as much for form as for foliage, and a favorite subject for bonsai.
Hong Kong Kumquat is an evergreen shrub with the smallest fruits of the true citrus. It is a great plant for containers or smaller spaces. The Chinese preserve the colorful orange raisin-sized fruits for spicy flavoring but it is grown chiefly as a novelty ornamental. It is hardy outoors here in Aiken, SC but not likely to be winter hardy in colder zones. As with all Citrus these cannot be shipped to Florida, Texas, Louisiana, California, Arizona, or California.
Fortunella obovata 'Changshou' is the Changshou kumquat, the sweetest and most generous of the kumquat tribe, whose fruit swells to the size of a ping-pong ball, far larger than the little oval kumquats most people know. Round to gently obovate, ripening bright orange, that fruit is eaten whole, skin and all, the thin rind sweeter and more tender than any other kumquat's. A compact, dense, thornless evergreen, the Changshou is as pretty in a pot as it is productive.
This one is named for a doctor and a place. The epithet gardenii honors Alexander Garden, the Scottish physician who settled in Charleston in 1752 and was first to find this shrub, describe the species, and send a plant across to England, the same Garden the gardenia is named for, though this Carolina native may be the truer monument. (The genus belongs to his English correspondent Dr. John Fothergill, in whose garden the shrub later grew; the species is Garden's.) Their home is the southeastern coastal plain, the low acid country of bogs and pine savannahs from the Carolinas to the Florida panhandle and Alabama, scattered and never common, the kind of habitat that disappears quietly.
