A small-to-medium evergreen oak unlike anything in the North American flora. Quercus salicina belongs to section Cyclobalanopsis of the oak genus, the ring-cupped oaks, an entirely Asian group of evergreen oaks distinguished from every American oak by the concentric rings on the acorn cup, rather than the overlapping scales of the red and white oak groups. Some taxonomists treat Cyclobalanopsis as a genus of its own. To grow this oak in a Southeastern garden is to bring in a fundamentally different evolutionary lineage, one that has been evolving in isolation in the temperate forests of Japan and Korea for tens of millions of years, in parallel with the separate American radiation. The result reads as recognizably Quercus in habit and presence, yet is architecturally distinct in nearly every detail.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
Quercus stellata, the post oak, is one of the great toughs of the eastern white oaks, a tree born to dry uplands, old fields, and rocky ridges from the sandy hills of the Carolinas and Georgia across the Piedmont and into the prairies of Texas and the Midwest. Where soils are thin and the summers unrelenting, post oak has made a living, holding ground against wind, sun, and time itself.
Nuttall oak is named for Thomas Nuttall, the restless English-American naturalist who botanized the young United States more thoroughly than almost anyone of his generation. Long known as Quercus nuttallii, the tree now carries the name Quercus texana in most botanical usage, a change that has caused no end of confusion, since the name once belonged to a different oak. Whatever the label, this is a large deciduous red oak of the Southern bottomlands, at home in the floodplain forests of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley.
Few trees carry the weight of the South the way the live oak does. Quercus virginiana is the massive, broad-spreading, long-lived evergreen oak of the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas, the tree of avenues and old plantations, of moss-hung branches reaching low and wide over generations of the same ground. Given room and time, a live oak grows far wider than tall, the great limbs sweeping out and often down to rest on the earth, and the whole tree becomes a piece of living architecture. Georgia named the live oak the state tree, and ancient specimens are landmarks across the Deep South.
The Southern live oak needs no introduction in the coastal South, where the great, spreading, moss-draped evergreens are as much a part of the landscape as the light. Quercus virginiana 'Bok Tower' begins from that familiar species but carries an unusual story and, perhaps, an unusual future.
Rhaphiolepis umbellata is the hardiest of the Yeddo hawthorns, an evergreen member of the rose family (Rosaceae) that grows wild on the sea cliffs and coastal thickets of Japan and Korea. The genus name joins the Greek raphis, a needle, with lepis, a scale, a nod to the narrow bracts beneath the flower clusters, while the species epithet umbellata describes the way the blossoms gather into rounded, umbel-like heads. Western gardeners know the shrub as Indian hawthorn, a slightly misleading name, since the plant hails from East Asia rather than the subcontinent and is no true hawthorn at all.
'Great Balls of Fire' belongs to the celebrated line of Aromi azaleas, the life's work of Dr. Eugene Aromi, a University of South Alabama education professor who set out in the late 1960s simply to help the azaleas in his Mobile front yard survive the Gulf Coast's brutal heat and humidity. What began as a backyard experiment grew into one of the great American breeding programs. From 1971 onward Aromi crossed cold-hardy Exbury and Knap Hill azaleas with tough southern native species, chief among them the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chasing large, fragrant, heat-proof deciduous flowers. He made more than a thousand crosses and raised over fifty thousand seedlings before his death in 2004, and roughly a hundred of the best were named. This is counted among them.
Sunbow Solar Flare is the patented name for the azalea catalogued as Rhododendron 'QbackB' (U.S. Plant Patent 27,083), a deciduous native hybrid bred for the very conditions that defeat most azaleas. The plant traces to a deliberate cross made in 1984 by Robert Edward Lee in Folsom, Louisiana, who set out to combine the fragrance and vivid color of the Gulf Coast's own Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, with the substance of the Exbury hybrids. A seedling from austrinum open-pollinated with the hybrid 'Gibraltar' was crossed onto 'Chetco', and from that union Lee selected this standout in 1990.
'Aromi Sunrise' is a deciduous azalea from the storied breeding program of Dr. Eugene Aromi, the University of South Alabama professor who spent decades teaching heat-shy azaleas to flourish along the Gulf Coast. Introduced in 1987, this hybrid marries the bold Knap Hill azalea 'Hiawatha' with the native Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, so the plant inherits both the size and clarity of the English strains and the toughness and fragrance of a southern wildflower. The result is exactly what Aromi chased across more than a thousand crosses: a large-flowered, sweet-scented, heat-tolerant azalea for gardens where the classic mountain sorts fail.
'Aromi Sunstruck' is one of the deciduous azaleas raised by Dr. Eugene Aromi, the Mobile educator whose decades of patient hybridizing gave the Deep South a whole race of heat-tolerant azaleas. Beginning in the late 1960s, Aromi crossed the large, brilliant Exbury and Knap Hill strains with hardy southern natives, above all the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, to win big, fragrant flowers on shrubs that could take Gulf Coast summers. He described more than fifty thousand seedlings over a lifetime of work and named only the finest hundred or so; 'Aromi Sunstruck' carries that pedigree of selection.
Rhododendron alabamense, the Alabama azalea, is one of the loveliest and, by wide agreement, one of the most powerfully fragrant of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Southeast. The species grows in hardwood forests and along dry slopes and ridges from north-central Alabama east through western Georgia and into South Carolina, where in mid spring the woods fill with the scent of lemon. Clusters of six to ten white, funnel-shaped flowers, each marked with a clear yellow blotch and finished with long, arching stamens, open just before or alongside the emerging leaves. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek, while azalea derives from azaleos, meaning dry, a nod to the well-drained upland ground these shrubs favor.
Rhododendron arborescens, the sweet or smooth azalea, is one of the hardiest and most graceful of the native white azaleas, a tall, loosely branched deciduous shrub of the eastern mountains and piedmont. The common name smooth azalea points to the hairless, glossy twigs and leaves that set the species apart from woollier kin, while sweet azalea speaks to the flowers, which pour out a rich heliotrope perfume. The species epithet arborescens is Latin for becoming tree-like, a fair description of an old plant that can reach ten to eighteen feet, and the genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek.
This is a remarkable early-blooming form of the sweet azalea, Rhododendron arborescens, the tall, hairless-twigged native prized for white summer flowers and an intense heliotrope perfume. Where the species is famous as one of the last azaleas to bloom, carrying fragrant white flowers with showy red stamens well into summer, this selection turns that timing on its head.
Rhododendron atlanticum, the coastal or dwarf azalea, is a low, colony-forming native of the open pine woods and sandy flatwoods of the mid-Atlantic and Carolina coastal plain. Unlike the tall wild azaleas of the mountains, this species stays close to the ground, often no higher than the knee, and spreads by underground runners, or stolons, into broad, drifting colonies. The bluish, glaucous foliage is a hallmark, cool and sea-gray, and the species name atlanticum simply marks the plant's home along the Atlantic seaboard. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek; azalea comes from azaleos, meaning dry, a fitting root for a shrub of sandy, well-drained ground.
This fragrant deciduous azalea is a garden cross between two native species, the low, glaucous-leaved coast azalea, Rhododendron atlanticum, and the golden Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum. From the first parent the hybrid inherits sweet fragrance and cool foliage; from the second, warmth of color and vigor. The result, selected here for pale, clear yellow flowers, blends the best of both, and where the ranges of the two species meet along the Southern coastal plain, such crosses occasionally arise in the wild as well.
Rhododendron austrinum, the Florida azalea, is among the earliest and most powerfully fragrant of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Deep South. Native to the Florida Panhandle, southern Georgia, southern Alabama, and into Mississippi, the species haunts open pine woods, ravine slopes, and river bluffs, often growing in sandy, acidic ground beneath tall longleaf pines. The species name austrinum simply means southern, a fitting label for an azalea so at home in the Gulf Coast heat, and the genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek.
This is a white-flowered form of Rhododendron austrinum (which see). This white form of the normally yellow-flowered Florida Azalea was selected by Florida plantsman Steve Riefler in northwest Florida.
The Florida Azalea is a large growing deciduous azalea. The fragrant flowers very early and typically yellow. The flowers of this clone are a unique coral color. This selection was found some years ago and introduced by Falling Waters Nursery in Chipley, Florida. Florida Azalea blooms here in South Carolina in late March-early April and is one of the best native azaleas for the Deep South. It grows well with irrigation under tall pines where soil is sandy, acidic, and well-drained. It is native to Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama.
'Reagan' is a richly colored selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen in the wild in Florida near the Apalachicola River, the great blackwater river whose ravines shelter some of the Southeast's rarest plants. Where the typical Florida azalea runs to clear gold and orange, this form pairs yellow petals with deep reddish-pink buds and flower tubes, so that from a distance the whole shrub takes on a warm, red-flushed glow uncommon in the species.
