Physostegia virginiana, the obedient plant, is a familiar native of moist meadows and streamsides across eastern North America, and 'Vivid' is the compact, richly colored selection that has become a garden standard. Upright spikes of deep rose-pink, tubular flowers rise on square, mint-family stems in mid to late summer, holding strong color into early fall when much of the border is fading.
Pieris phillyreifolia, the climbing fetterbush, is one of the strangest and most wonderful of Southeastern natives, an evergreen member of the heath family with a habit unlike any other hardy shrub. In cultivation the plant grows as a neat, small evergreen shrub of two to three feet, clothed in narrow, leathery dark green leaves about an inch long.
Pieris ryukyuensis is the lily-of-the-valley shrub of the Ryukyu Islands, the warm archipelago that trails south from Japan toward Taiwan, and 'Temple Bells' is a choice selection of this heat-tolerant species. The glossy, slightly toothed evergreen leaves emerge a warm bronze and mature to deep green, giving a polished, year-round presence on a dense, rounded frame of three to six feet.
Piloblephis rigida, wild or Florida pennyroyal, is a compact evergreen native mint from the sandy scrublands and pine flatwoods of Florida. The plant forms a low, tidy mound of fine, needle-like foliage that carries a clean, resinous, minty fragrance, released at a brush of the hand or on a warm afternoon in the sun.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Almost everything about Pinus glabra argues against their being a pine at all. The bark is smooth and gray, close-grained, so like the bark of an oak or hickory that people walk straight past a mature one without taking the tree for a conifer; it is the single most reliable way to know the tree. The needles are soft, short, and paired, a cool dark green, worn in a dense rounded crown rather than the open candelabra of their relatives. And most usefully, they tolerate shade. Where nearly every other southern pine demands full sun and open, burned ground, spruce pine settles happily into the wooded margins just above the bottomlands, growing in the understory beneath oaks, beech, and magnolia. They were named by Thomas Walter, the English-born botanist of the Santee whose Flora Caroliniana appeared in London in 1788, the year before he died; the epithet glabra, meaning smooth and hairless, marks those glabrous young twigs. Even the timber keeps its own counsel, drying at so different a rate from other southern pines that mills cannot season it in the same batch. This is a pine for the places pines aren't supposed to go: the shaded corner, the woodland edge, the spot where you wanted evergreen structure and assumed you couldn't have it. Once you can recognize one, you start wanting them everywhere the light runs thin.
Before the South was farms and pavement it was, in great part, longleaf: an open, sunlit forest of widely spaced pines over a ground layer so rich a single square yard could hold dozens of species, the whole thing held together by fire. They ran across tens of millions of acres of the coastal plain, by some counts as many as ninety million, from Virginia to east Texas, and almost all of it is gone now, which is the quiet grief behind every longleaf you meet. They gave the South tar, pitch, and turpentine, the naval stores that caulked the wooden fleets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and earned North Carolinians the nickname tar heels. Pinus palustris is the patient one. A seedling spends years as a dense green tussock, looking for all the world like a clump of grass and fooling everyone who doesn't know better, while underground they drive a deep taproot and wait out the fires that clear their rivals. Then they bolt, throwing up a single thick candle of a stem before they bother with branches. The needles are the longest of any eastern pine, well past a foot, hanging in soft fountains and catching wind like nothing else in the genus. Give one sun and room and you are planting the architecture the gopher tortoise and the red-cockaded woodpecker were waiting for. They ask only for patience, and they reward it for three hundred years.
Pistacia chinensis, the Chinese pistache, is a medium-sized deciduous tree and a close relative of the pistachio nut, though this species carries no crop for the table. What the tree offers instead is one of the finest autumn shows in the warm South: lustrous, dark green compound leaves that ignite, nearly all at once, into a fire of scarlet, orange, and red before they fall.
Pithecoctenium cynanchoides, the monkey's comb, is a vigorous, tendril-climbing vine of the trumpet-creeper family, Bignoniaceae, native to the warm woodlands and thickets of South America. Semi-evergreen in mild climates, the vine climbs by many-branched tendrils and clothes a support quickly in heart-shaped, three-parted leaves, the terminal leaflet often turned into a grasping tendril of its own.
In Japan they call the shrub tobira, short for tobira no ki, the door tree, because the cut branches were hung in the doorway at Setsubun to turn back demons at the threshold of spring. The broken wood smells rank, which was rather the point: bad spirits, like most of us, would rather not walk through a bad smell. The genus name is kinder and more exact, pitta and sporos, pitch and seed, for the resin that coats the black seeds and glues them to whatever bird carries them off.
A refined and rarely offered evergreen from New Zealand, Podocarpus acutifolius forms a dense, finely textured silhouette of short, sharp-tipped leaves that give the plant a crisp, architectural presence. Heat-tolerant and well suited to the southern United States when properly sited, this uncommon conifer offers structure, restraint, and year-round depth in the landscape.
Podocarpus macrophyllus, the yew pine, is a familiar evergreen conifer grown as a shrub or small tree across the southern United States, valued for dense, dark, strap-like leaves several inches long and a tidy, upright frame. 'Okina' is the variegated form, a relatively recent introduction from Japan, whose new growth emerges creamy white before settling to soft green.
This low-growing form of Podocarpus macrophyllus is a compact, spreading evergreen with flat, needle-like leaves that spiral tightly around the stems. Where the ordinary yew pine climbs into an upright shrub or small tree, this selection stays low and horizontal, building a dense, glossy green mat of steady year-round texture and structure.
A conifer of mist and mountains, Podocarpus parlatorei comes from isolated cloud-forest ridges just east of the Andes in Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. Rare in the wild and scarcely seen in cultivation, this CITES-listed species is one of the most unusual evergreen introductions Woodlanders has ever offered.
Podranea ricasoliana, the pink trumpet vine or Port St. John's creeper, is a fast-growing evergreen climber from the warm regions of South Africa, a member of the trumpet-creeper family, Bignoniaceae, prized for showy, trumpet-shaped flowers.
A spring-blooming native of the eastern woodlands, found from Ontario and Quebec south through the Appalachians and as far west as Minnesota and Oklahoma, growing on rich deciduous forest floors, along streambanks, and at the bases of sandstone canyons. Polemonium reptans is one of those native plants that rewards close attention. The leaves are pinnately compound, with seven to twenty-one paired leaflets running up each stem like the rungs of a ladder, the source of the common name, which gestures all the way back to the biblical Jacob and his dream of a stairway to heaven. The genus name is older still: Polemonium honors King Polemon of Pontus, an ancient Greek ruler with a side interest in herbalism.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications, general wellness
Elevate your garden with the Pollinator’s Haven Bundle, a thoughtfully curated selection of botanicals that celebrate the delicate balance of beauty and ecological purpose.
Polygala x dalmaisiana, the sweet pea shrub, is a fast-growing evergreen hybrid of two South African species (P. oppositifolia and P. myrtifolia), grown for a nearly year-round show of orchid-like flowers on an open, informal frame.
Polygonatum commutatum, the great or giant Solomon's seal, is a bold native perennial of the eastern North American woodlands, sending up tall, unbranched, gracefully arching stems clad in broad, oval, alternate leaves. From the leaf axils along the underside of each stem hang small, creamy-white, bell-shaped flowers, usually in pairs, in late spring and early summer.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
3–5 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
pain relief, digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
Polygonatum odoratum 'Variegatum', the variegated Solomon's seal, is one of the most graceful of all shade perennials, an Old World cousin of the native Solomon's seals grown for luminous, cream-edged foliage on arching stems. Each lance-shaped leaf carries a soft green center rimmed and streaked in creamy white, and the new stems flush a warm rose before greening.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, digestive health, general wellness
Polyspora axillaris, the fried egg tree, is a glossy, small evergreen tree or large shrub of the tea family, Theaceae, native to southern China, Taiwan, and Vietnam and still rarely cultivated in the United States. A close relative of the native loblolly bay (Gordonia lasianthus), the plant bears abundant, showy white flowers three inches across.
