Every so often a plant arrives not from a breeder's bench but from a neighbor's yard, and Lantana camara 'Miss Huff' is one of those happy accidents. The selection was found in cultivation near Athens, Georgia, in the garden of the Miss Huff for whom the plant is named, and introduced to the trade by the former Goodness Grows Nursery. What set this lantana apart was cold tolerance: where most of the tribe sulk and die at the first hard freeze, 'Miss Huff' has proven the hardiest lantana in commerce, with well-established clumps shrugging off brief dips to a few degrees below zero and returning faithfully from the root even in zone 7.
Where the shrubby lantanas stand up, Lantana montevidensis lies down and travels. This is the trailing lantana, a low, weeping member of the verbena family, Verbenaceae, native to the warm grasslands of southern South America, from southern Brazil across Uruguay and Paraguay into Argentina. The species carries a place name in the epithet: montevidensis means of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital near which the plant was first gathered and described, so the botanical name is really a small geography lesson tucked into Latin.
No plant carries a heavier freight of story than Laurus nobilis, the bay laurel of the Mediterranean and the original laurel of the victor's crown. The genus name is simply the classical Latin for the tree, and the epithet nobilis means noble or renowned, a fair description of a plant whose leaves once crowned poets, athletes, and returning generals. The whole vocabulary of achievement still leans on this tree: a baccalaureate, a poet laureate, and the warning not to rest on one's laurels all trace back to the wreath of bay. In Greek myth the laurel was born of unrequited love, when the nymph Daphne, fleeing Apollo, was changed into a laurel tree by her father the river god; ever after the god wore the leaves in her memory, and the tree became sacred to him.
There are plants that offer fragrance, and then there are plants that conjure memory. Lavandula dentata, with silvery, sawtoothed leaves and near ever-blooming lavender plumes, belongs firmly to the second kind, a bearer of the sort of scent that lingers in a sun-warmed linen chest or in the folds of a well-worn book left on a porch rail.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, topical applications, respiratory support, digestive health
Lavandula × intermedia is the lavender that finally makes sense of the Southeast. A natural and cultivated cross between English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) and spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia), the plant is known in Provence as lavandin, and there the sterile, vigorous hybrid has long been the mainstay of the perfume fields, prized for a heavier yield of fragrant oil than either parent alone. The name records that middle ground: intermedia, intermediate, a lavender poised between the sweet refinement of the English kind and the camphorous punch of the spike.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, topical applications, respiratory support
Few late-summer plants command a border like Leonotis leonurus, the lion's ear of the South African veld. Tall square stems, the signature of the mint family, Lamiaceae, rise five feet and more before breaking into tier upon tier of burnt-orange flowers, each whorl circling the stem like a ruff. The velvety, curved tubes are the source of both common names, lion's ear and lion's tail, and the botany agrees: Leonotis comes from the Greek for lion's ear, and leonurus for lion's tail.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
2–4 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, topical applications, general wellness
By late summer, when many shrubs have said their piece, Lespedeza thunbergii 'Spring Grove' is only clearing its throat. The many woody, arching stems bend into a green fountain through the season, then bow lower still under a long, generous fall of rose-purple pea flowers carried in racemes six to eight inches long. 'Spring Grove' is a newer selection said to hold darker purple flowers and a tidier, better habit than the old standard 'Gibraltar', and the photographs here come courtesy of the JC Raulston Arboretum.
Leucothoe populifolia, still fondly called Agarista populifolia by those who knew the plant before the name changed, is the giant of a genus otherwise built low to the ground. Where most leucothoes hug the shade at knee height, this one climbs, sending up tall, erect stems that arch at the tips into a fountain of glossy evergreen leaves, and given years and room the shrub can pass for a small multi-stemmed tree of twelve to fifteen feet.
Leucothoe racemosa, the sweetbells of Eastern wetland edges, is a fine native shrub too seldom planted. Found wild across the eastern United States in acidic woodland soils that stay damp but never flood, the plant grows upright and loosely branched to six or eight feet, deciduous to semi-evergreen depending on the winter. Botanists now file the species under the name Eubotrys racemosa, though the older Leucothoe is the name most gardeners still use.
Liatris spicata, the blazing star or gayfeather, sends up rockets of feathery purple in the heart of summer, one of the great vertical accents of the North American prairie. The species is native to the moist meadows, prairies, and wet savannas of eastern North America, where the flower spikes once rose in their thousands among the tall grasses. Set against those horizontal sweeps of grass, the erect, bottlebrush spikes give any planting a jolt of structure and color.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
immune support, respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, digestive health
Ligustrum quihoui, the waxyleaf or Quihou privet, saves the family's best trick for last. Where most privets flower in late spring, this species from northern and central China waits until late summer and even early autumn, then covers itself in long, airy panicles of small creamy-white flowers, sweetly and unmistakably fragrant. In a season when the flowering shrubs are mostly finished, that late show is worth a good deal.
An evergreen spicebush is a rare thing, and Lindera akoensis is one of the best. Woodlanders grew this shrub from cuttings taken in the garden of Bobby Green of Green's Nursery in Fairhope, Alabama, shared simply as an evergreen Lindera from Taiwan. The plant matches the botanical description of Lindera akoensis, a species of low mountain woodland in Taiwan, and has proven a handsome, glossy-leaved evergreen for the southern garden.
Lindera megaphylla is a plant for the patient collector, a broad-leaved evergreen of real presence and pedigree that reveals itself over seasons rather than days. The species comes from the mist-laden mountain forests of western China, where the shrub grows in dappled light among rhododendrons and ancient oaks. Sir Harold Hillier, the great British plantsman, first shared this rarity with Western gardens in the 1970s from his famous nursery, and even now the Chinese spicebush remains uncommon in cultivation.
Lithocarpus are evergreen trees related to both oak and chestnut. The acorns are like oak and the clusters of white flower spikes are like chestnut. The flowers are showy but ill scented. This species is native to eastern Asia and makes a nice dense evergreen tree somewhat like Quercus glauca. It is a useful tree for the South and should have an open site with good soil that is well-drained.
Lithocarpus henryi, the Henry tanoak, is an evergreen cousin of the oaks that few gardeners have met. Native to the mountain forests of central China, the tree carries long, narrow, pointed leaves of glossy deep green and builds, in time, a dense, rounded evergreen crown of fifteen to twenty-five feet. Among a genus of mostly tender species, this one ranks as the hardiest, which is what makes the Henry tanoak worth seeking out for milder temperate gardens.
Few native perennials burn as bright as Lobelia cardinalis, the cardinal flower, whose late-summer spikes of pure, velvety scarlet stop traffic in any garden. The species ranges across much of North America along stream banks, wet meadows, and ditches, and takes the common name from the vivid red of a cardinal's robes. From a low rosette of broad green leaves rises a stiff, unbranched stem hung with tubular flowers built, as luck would have it, precisely to the reach of a hummingbird's bill.
Where the cardinal flower runs to scarlet, Lobelia siphilitica answers in blue. The great blue lobelia sends up leafy spikes packed with inch-long, two-lipped flowers of clear, saturated blue in late summer and early fall, one of the truest blues in the native flora and a gift to the garden at a tired time of year. The species grows wild across eastern and central North America in moist meadows, low woods, and along streamsides.
Coral honeysuckle in a suit of gold: Lonicera sempervirens 'John Clayton' trades the fire-engine red of the species for clear, warm yellow, borne in the same neat whorled clusters at the branch tips. This is a compact, well-mannered, repeat-blooming selection of one of the finest native vines of the eastern United States, flowering from late spring through summer and often again in fall.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Leo' is the coral honeysuckle at its free-flowering best, a selection of the native red honeysuckle that covers itself in bright red, yellow-throated trumpets over an unusually long season. The tubular flowers pour nectar for ruby-throated hummingbirds, which find the vine as irresistible as gardeners do, and the blue-green leaves, some fused right around the stem, make a cool foil for all that heat.
For a vine that earns a place on the fence, few honeysuckles match Lonicera × heckrottii 'Goldflame'. This is a hybrid grown for two gifts at once: bold color and a sweet, faintly citrus fragrance that hangs in the air on warm evenings. The trumpet flowers open in a blend of deep rose-pink and golden orange, like a watercolor sunset, and keep coming from late spring through early fall.
