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.
In the dead of winter, when the garden asks for little and gives less, Lonicera × purpusii answers with perfume. This winter honeysuckle is a hybrid of two Chinese species, Lonicera fragrantissima and Lonicera standishii, and carries the best of both: small, creamy-white, tubular flowers that open along the bare stems from late winter into early spring, throwing a clean, lemon-sweet fragrance that carries yards on a mild day.
Bold, burnished orange trumpets in generous early-summer clusters make Lonicera × tellmanniana one of the most striking climbing honeysuckles ever raised. The hybrid crosses the American coral honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, with the large-flowered Chinese Lonicera tragophylla, and takes the best of each: vivid color, strong growth, and clean foliage, without the invasive streak of the weedy honeysuckles.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Sulphurea' is coral honeysuckle gone golden, a yellow-flowered form of the native trumpet honeysuckle that trades the usual scarlet for clear, soft sulphur-yellow. The tubular flowers cluster in tiered whorls at the branch tips from late spring through summer, glowing against fresh green leaves so the whole vine looks sunlit even under a gray sky.
This Chinese evergreen shrub in the witch hazel family can become almost tree-like with age, reaching fifteen to twenty feet on a layered, wide-spreading frame. The leaves are small, dark green, and slightly rough, held densely enough to read as a solid mass from a distance. In early spring the whole shrub covers itself in white flowers built from narrow filamentous petals, four to a flower, giving the fringed effect that runs through the whole witch hazel family and a light sweet fragrance to go with it. That fringe is where the common name Chinese fringe flower comes from, though the name Chinese fringetree is more properly applied to another plant entirely, Chionanthus retusus.
Loropetalum chinense 'Zhuzhou Fuchsia' is Chinese fringe flower at full volume: deep, wine-purple evergreen foliage set alight in spring by tassels of vivid fuchsia-pink bloom. Each flower is a little spray of narrow, strap-shaped petals, fringe-like and slightly whimsical, clustered thickly along the branches so the whole shrub seems to smoulder pink against purple.
Luma apiculata, the Chilean myrtle, is grown above all for the extraordinary bark: smooth, sinuous trunks in warm cinnamon-orange that peel to reveal cream beneath, a living sculpture that glows in low winter light. An evergreen of the myrtle family, Myrtaceae, the plant hails from the temperate rainforests of Chile and neighboring Argentina, where whole groves, most famously the Bosque de Arrayanes on Lake Nahuel Huapi, are built of these twisting, apricot-barked trunks.
Lygodium japonicum, known as Japanese climbing fern, is a fast-growing vine with delicate fronds. It climbs naturally and can cover trellises, arbors, or low fences.
Rusty Lyonia is a tall evergreen shrub often becoming tree-like with contorted branches. New leaves are rusty red. Flowers are small fragrant white bells. Plant in sunny or lightly shaded site with sandy acid soil and good drainage. This species is native to sandy pinelands and sand scrub from lower South Carolina through Florida.
Lyonia lucida, the fetterbush, is one of the quiet evergreen pleasures of the Southeastern wetlands, a shrub of upright, arching stems clothed in glossy, leathery leaves. Look closely and each smooth leaf shows a fine vein running just inside the margin, a neat identifying mark, and the species name lucida, Latin for shining, salutes that polished surface. The common name comes from the dense, tangling thickets the shrub forms in the wild, said to fetter anyone trying to walk through.
Lyonia lucida 'Morris Minor' is Woodlanders' own compact selection of the native fetterbush, a tidier, smaller-leaved form of one of the Southeast's finest evergreen shrubs. The name is a small joke and a tribute at once: the little, rounded leaves recall the Morris Minor motorcar, and the selection honors the landowner, Mr. Morris, on whose property the original plant was found.
The Lauraceae is an underappreciated family. Its members include cinnamon, camphor, bay laurel, and the avocado, which gives you some sense of the range of things the family has contributed to human civilization. Machilus thunbergii is another member in good standing, though these trees arrive in the Western garden with considerably less fanfare than their relatives. In East Asia they are well known: a coastal evergreen tree native to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, and Vietnam, valued for timber, planted as a street tree, and the source of makko, a powder derived from the bark and used for centuries to bind incense and, in a more practical application, to repel mosquitoes. The bark also has a history in traditional medicine. Here, in other words, is a tree that has been useful to people for a very long time, which is not a bad thing for a plant to be.
Magnolia acuminata, the cucumbertree, is the giant of the native magnolias and the only one hardy far into the North. A deciduous forest tree of the eastern United States, most majestic in the southern Appalachians, the cucumbertree can rise seventy to ninety feet into a broad, rounded canopy, valued as a fast-growing, exceptionally hardy shade tree for parks and large lawns.
Magnolia ashei, the Ashe magnolia, is one of the great show-offs of the plant world packed into a shrub-sized frame. The enormous leaves, often two feet long and nearly a foot wide, give a decidedly tropical air, and the flowers are astonishing: creamy-white goblets up to a foot across, sweetly fragrant, each marked with a bold purple blotch at the base of the inner petals. Best of all, the Ashe magnolia blooms while still young and small, sometimes at barely knee height, a rare gift among magnolias.
Magnolia ashei × macrophylla is a rare hybrid of colossal foliage and dinner-plate blooms, a deliberate cross between two of North America's most dramatic native magnolias: the endangered Ashe magnolia, Magnolia ashei, and the bigleaf magnolia, Magnolia macrophylla. The cross brings together the best of both parents, the immense tropical-looking leaves, the enormous fragrant flowers, and a habit that settles into a handsome middle ground between shrub and small tree.
Magnolia cordata is the yellow cucumbertree, a smaller, more garden-friendly cousin of the towering cucumbertree magnolia and, botanically, a variety of it, Magnolia acuminata var. subcordata. Where the parent species climbs seventy feet and hides greenish flowers high in the canopy, this yellow-flowered form stays a modest tree of twenty-five to thirty-five feet and carries the trait breeders have chased for generations: tulip-shaped blooms of clear, canary yellow.
Magnolia figo, the banana shrub, is one of those old Southern garden treasures that scent a whole spring evening, and 'Port Wine' is a fine, deep-colored form. Long grown under the name Michelia figo and only lately folded into the genus Magnolia, the plant makes a large, dense, lustrous evergreen shrub or small tree, handsome in leaf all year but grown, above all, for the perfume.
Magnolia kobus, the kobus magnolia, is a hardy, deciduous magnolia from Japan, grown for a froth of white, lightly fragrant flowers on bare branches in earliest spring. The Japanese name kobushi, from which the species takes its epithet, means fist, a nod to the plump flower buds and knobby young fruit that look like a small clenched hand.
