Of all the patterned mountain laurels, 'Bullseye' plays the boldest trick with color. The cinnamon-purple buds are handsome in their own right, and when they open the flowers reveal a broad band of deep purple-maroon ringing a white throat and a clean white edge, the concentric target that gives this selection a name. 'Bullseye' belongs to Kalmia latifolia, the broadleaf evergreen native to the acid slopes of the eastern United States, and represents the golden era of Kalmia breeding led by Dr. Richard Jaynes at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, whose decades of selection gave gardeners the banded, picoteed, and richly budded laurels grown today.
Most mountain laurels are shrubs with presence, upright and woody and faintly aristocratic. 'Croft Carpet' flips the script. This rare, prostrate selection of Kalmia latifolia stays low and spreads into a dense evergreen mat, delivering the understory finish that designers chase in shade gardens: lush, deliberate, and quietly polished. A specimen at the JC Raulston Arboretum measured only about one foot tall while spreading many times as wide.
'Pristine' is a pure white-flowered mountain laurel, a luminous departure from the pink and rose-flushed forms of the wild species. The selection was discovered in Aiken County, South Carolina by the late Mrs. Ernestine Law and introduced to cultivation by Woodlanders, a distinctive regional expression of one of the most iconic broadleaf evergreens of the eastern United States. Where typical Kalmia latifolia opens blush-toned, 'Pristine' unfurls in clean, brilliant white, a serene presence that reads especially bright planted en masse or set against darker evergreens.
'Willowwood' is a Woodlanders introduction selected from a mountain laurel found growing in Aiken County, South Carolina. What sets this laurel apart at first glance is the foliage: narrow, willow-like leaves that lend the shrub a finer, more linear texture than the broad-leaved wild Kalmia latifolia. In bloom, 'Willowwood' carries pink flowers with distinct banding, gathered in the familiar rounded clusters that make mountain laurel such a valued broadleaf evergreen for woodland gardens.
This seemingly unlikely hybrid crosses the familiar mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) with the diminutive, far less known sandhill laurel (Kalmia hirsuta) of the Deep South, two species that could hardly look more different. The cross was probably first made by the late, great Alabama nurseryman Tom Dodd, Jr., and further investigated by the Connecticut Kalmia expert Dr. Richard Jaynes, whose lifetime of work did more than anyone's to bring the genus into gardens.
Kerria is a monotypic genus, a single species that stands alone in the rose family (Rosaceae), native to the mountain woodlands of China and Japan. The old-fashioned kerria has bright green, arching stems and toothed leaves, and in spring the branches light up with flowers that in the common double form look like tiny golden roses. The genus honors William Kerr, the Kew plant hunter who sent the double-flowered form back to England from Canton in the early 1800s, and in Japan the plant is beloved as yamabuki, a name woven through centuries of poetry celebrating that spring yellow.
William Kerr arrived in Guangzhou in 1803 as the first professional plant hunter posted permanently in China, dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to send back whatever the southern port cities could offer. Among his returns was a double-flowered shrub with bright yellow, pompon-like blooms, gathered from cultivation and shipped to Kew in 1805. The genus was eventually named Kerria in his honor. His later years were less distinguished, marked by an opium habit and a thinning correspondence, and he died in Ceylon in 1814. The double-flowered form he introduced, 'Pleniflora', went on to become one of the most common shrubs in Victorian gardens, present in nearly every collection of the era and still widely planted today.
A refined and rarely encountered evergreen conifer from the mountains of southeastern China and Taiwan, Keteleeria davidiana is a tree of quiet distinction. Introduced to Western gardens in the nineteenth century, the species has stayed largely within botanical gardens and specialist collections, seldom offered in the nursery trade and still little known outside conifer circles. The genus name honors J. B. Keteleer, a French nurseryman of the era, while the epithet davidiana remembers Armand David, the missionary-naturalist who botanized widely in China.
The Chinese flame tree is a fast-growing, upright ornamental of coarse, handsome structure, casting medium shade and broadening with age into a rounded crown of twenty to forty feet. A member of the soapberry family (Sapindaceae) native to southern China, Koelreuteria bipinnata carries large, twice-pinnate compound leaves that give the canopy a light, ferny texture through the growing season before turning soft yellow in fall.
The goldenrain tree is a deciduous member of the soapberry family (Sapindaceae), native to China and Korea and long cultivated across eastern Asia. Growing to a rounded twenty-five to thirty-five feet, the tree carries handsome pinnate compound leaves that cast a light, dappled shade, and in early to midsummer, later toward the north, the branches hang with large, airy panicles of small golden-yellow flowers, a soft rain of gold across the crown and the source of the common name goldenrain tree.
'Woodlanders Low Form' is a rare, shrubby selection of the goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata), a compact form that trades the usual rounded canopy for a low, dense frame of ten to twelve feet. The elegant, pinnate compound leaves and the showy summer panicles of small, bright yellow flowers are all present, simply gathered into a modest footprint that suits a small garden far better than the full species.
Ernest Wilson came across this shrub in the late summer of 1901, up in the mountains above Ichang in western Hubei, and sent the seed home to Veitch in Exeter. Of the two thousand or so Asian plants he introduced to the West, "Chinese" Wilson counted Kolkwitzia amabilis among his finest, which is no small ranking once you consider the company they were keeping. Dirr, in the Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, is content to let the explorer have the last word. The beautybush flowered in England by 1910 and went on to become very nearly the defining garden shrub of America between the wars, then quietly slipped out of fashion. These shrubs turn up far less often now than they ought to.
Seashore mallow is an erect, branching herbaceous perennial of the cotton family (Malvaceae), the same clan as hibiscus, hollyhock, and cotton, and the kinship shows in the flowers. Native to the brackish and salt marshes of the eastern United States, from New York and Delaware south to Florida and Texas, the species carries hibiscus-like blooms from midsummer well into fall, each a clear five-petaled cup around a central column of fused stamens. This selection, 'Alba', trades the usual soft pink for pure, clean white.
Among crape myrtles, Lagerstroemia fauriei is the aristocrat grown as much for bark as for bloom. A small, multi-stemmed, deciduous tree from Yakushima Island in southern Japan, first brought to botanical attention in the 1950s, the species reaches a graceful twenty-five to thirty-five feet with a rounded, vase-shaped crown. The summer flowers are white, carried in airy terminal panicles that are smaller and more delicate than the heavy trusses of the familiar Lagerstroemia indica.
'Bayou Marie' is a compact crape myrtle from the Dixie Series, a group of dwarf selections, chosen by David Chopin of Washington, Pennsylvania and introduced by Hines Nursery in California, in the same series as the purple 'New Orleans'. The flowers are the draw: abundant clusters of crinkled, crepe-textured pink blooms, each petal finished with a darker red to lavender edge that gives the whole shrub a lively, two-toned sparkle through the heat of summer.
'New Orleans' is a purple-flowered dwarf crape myrtle from the Dixie Series, a group that Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, describes as the miniature weeping crape myrtles for their low, softly cascading habit. The summer flowers are the rich violet-purple that gardeners rarely find at this small scale, crinkled and crepe-textured, borne in profusion across a mound of no more than two to three feet.
'Pixie White' is a true miniature crape myrtle, a low, compact selection that trades the usual upright tree for a small, spreading, often weeping mound. Through the warm season the plant covers the fine green foliage with clear, clean white flowers, the crinkled, crepe-textured blooms that name the whole clan, at a scale that fits the smallest garden.
'Pocomoke' is one of the smallest crape myrtles in cultivation, a dense, dwarf mound released by the U.S. National Arboretum in 1998 from the breeding program of Dr. Donald Egolf. A hybrid of the common crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) and the Japanese species (Lagerstroemia fauriei), 'Pocomoke' belongs to the group of Arboretum introductions named for Native American tribes and rivers, and carries the deep rose-pink flowers that set the selection apart at such a tiny scale.
The Lakeland limequat is a citrus lover's answer to cold: a compact, productive hybrid that pairs the hardiness of the kumquat with the bright, tropical punch of Key lime. One of three limequats bred by W. T. Swingle of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Florida in 1909 and named for the town of Lakeland, this cross (Citrus x floridana) joins the West Indian, or Key, lime with the round Marumi kumquat (Fortunella japonica). The result carries intense citrus flavor on a plant that thrives well beyond the usual citrus belt.
Few tender shrubs work as hard for as long as the lantanas, and Lantana camara 'Hybrida' distills the whole genus down to a single clear note of yellow. The species belongs to the verbena family, Verbenaceae, and hails from the West Indies and the warm reaches of Mexico south through tropical America, where the plant scrambles along roadsides and clearings in a haze of nectar and butterflies. The genus name is a borrowed one: Renaissance botanists lifted 'Lantana' from an old Latin name for the wayfaring tree, Viburnum lantana, whose domed flower clusters the lantana blooms happen to echo. The epithet camara is murkier, glossed variously as a vaulted chamber or a small boat, the true meaning long since lost to the record.
