Granite gooseberry is a rare native shrub of the rocky, granitic soils of the Southeast, turning up in widely scattered localities from Georgia to Texas. A low, deciduous plant of two to four feet, the arching branches root where they touch the ground and knit slowly into colonies, and the small, three-lobed leaves and purple, red-spined stems give the shrub a fine, distinctive texture.
Miccosukee gooseberry is one of the rarest shrubs in the Southeast, a federally threatened native known from just two places on earth: a single site in McCormick County, South Carolina, and another in Jefferson County, Florida. The low, arching shrub, two to four feet tall, carries spiny branches and forms small thickets on shaded hardwood-forest hillsides, and small, long-petaled, creamy flowers hang from the branches in their season, followed by half-inch greenish fruits armored with soft, flexible spines.
Rougeplant is a small, soft-stemmed perennial of the pokeweed family, native to Florida, Texas, and the warm Americas, grown for the long show of tiny flowers and the shining strings of bright red berries that follow. Where common pokeweed is coarse and towering, rougeplant is refined and knee-high or less, with small leaves and delicate, arching sprays that carry flowers and ripe fruit at the same time for months on end.
Hardiness
Zones 8–9
Light
Part Shade
Height
6–18 in.
Spread
8–12 in.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, digestive health
The dwarf pink locust is a charming, little-known native shrub, a low, stoloniferous plant of one to two feet with compound, deciduous leaves and hanging clusters of pretty pink pea flowers in spring. Scattered through the sandy pinelands of the southeastern United States, the plant spreads quietly by underground runners into a low colony, since seed is virtually never set and the shrub increases almost entirely by vegetative means.
This showy little locust came to Woodlanders by a happy accident. Planted years ago alongside a row of black locusts, Robinia pseudoacacia, on a nearby farm, one tree surprised everyone by opening not the usual white but clusters of vivid rose-purple pea flowers over compound leaves, followed by small, rough, slightly bristly seed pods. The origin is uncertain: a North American species, likely, but possibly a seedling from seed received years ago from China.
Rohdea japonica, the sacred lily or Nippon lily, is a bold, slow, tufted evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage, and this selection carries the darkest leaves of all, an almost black, glossy green that anchors a shaded planting through the whole year and lights up a winter landscape when little else holds. Rather sizeable red berries ripen in tight clusters, half-hidden at the base of the leaves, a quiet second season for anyone who looks closely.
The single white Lady Banks rose is the wild original, the mother of the whole clan, and to many noses the most fragrant rose in the garden. This is the species itself, Rosa banksiae in the true, single-flowered form, a vigorous, all but thornless evergreen climber from the hills and gorges of central China, capable of thirty or forty feet where a wall or a big tree will hold the weight. In spring the long, smooth green canes disappear under great hanging sprays of small single white flowers, each with a boss of gold stamens and a clean, sweet, violet-like scent that carries across a garden.
The double white Lady Banks rose is a true heirloom of Southern gardens, the kind of rose a grandmother trusted and passed along over the fence. Unlike most roses, this one asks for little and gives a great deal. Nearly thornless, the long green canes climb with ease, spilling over fences, arbors, and old farm gates as they have for generations.
Of all the plants that carry Sir Joseph Banks's name, and there are a great many, this rose carries his wife's. Banks was the most powerful botanist of his age: president of the Royal Society, the man who effectively built Kew, who had sailed with Cook to the far side of the world. When a thornless climbing rose came west out of the Chinese gardens, it was named not for him but for Dorothea, Lady Banks. The white double arrived first, collected at Canton in 1807. This one, the yellow, followed in 1824, carried back by the plant hunter John Damper Parks by way of the Calcutta botanic garden, an old Chinese garden form that had been grown and selected for generations before any Englishman set eyes on it.
Rosa 'Louis Philippe' came into the world in 1834 at Angers, France, raised by the rosarian Modeste Guérin and named for the man then on the throne, Louis Philippe, the Citizen King. His blood was royal in a second sense. Guérin is said to have bred him from 'Slater's Crimson China', one of the handful of repeat-blooming China roses that had reached Europe a generation earlier and overturned everything Western gardeners thought a rose could do. That rose had grown in Empress Joséphine's garden at Malmaison and been painted there by Redouté, and cuttings of its line found their way to Guérin's bench. This was a fashionable, well-connected rose, bound for the gardens of the European elite.
We have discontinued the propagation of this plant due to extensive documentation of invasive growth across the southeast. This page serves as a reference.
The pink Cherokee rose is a big, vigorous, early-flowering climber grown for one glorious effect: large, single, silvery-pink flowers, up to four inches across, each a simple five-petaled saucer lit by a central boss of gold stamens. Where the true Cherokee rose blooms white, this one blooms in clear, soft pink, and opens early, in the first warm reach of spring, ahead of most roses.
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Nearly every rose in your garden that blooms more than once a year owes a debt to this one. 'Old Blush' is a China rose, bred in China for something close to a thousand years and known there as the monthly pink, and they are generally reckoned the first East Asian rose to reach Europe, recorded in Sweden by 1752 and offered in England as Parson's Pink China in 1793. They brought with them the one thing Western roses simply did not have: the habit of blooming again and again across the season rather than once and done. Crossed into the old European roses, that single trait rewrote the genus. On the Ile Bourbon they met an autumn damask and produced the Bourbons; in Charleston, just down the road, the rice planter John Champneys crossed them with a musk rose and produced the first Noisette, the only rose class born in the American South. Bourbons, Noisettes, hybrid perpetuals, and in time the hybrid teas all trace back through this unassuming pink shrub. 'Old Blush' could have retired on the legacy and instead just kept flowering. In the South they are very nearly everblooming, throwing clusters of soft semi-double pink that, in the China way, deepen rather than fade in the sun, blush going to rose as each flower ages. The canes are nearly thornless, the constitution famously tough; these are the roses you still find blooming alone at abandoned homesteads, having outlived the house and the gardener both. Grow them for the flowers. Know that you are also growing the root of the whole modern family.
Vigorous spreading, deciduous hybrid rose climber also known as 'Spanish Beauty'. It has large pink flowers that are red in bud. It blooms in the spring. Its foliage is dark green and relatively free of common rose problems. I can grow in full sun or on a north wall. Heavy petal flowers tend to nod which is advantage in roses usually seen from below. This hybrid by Pedro Dot of Spain was introduced in 1927.
Rosemary is a timeless classic in both the garden and the kitchen, an aromatic evergreen shrub of the sun-baked Mediterranean coast, so distinctive that botanists long kept rosemary in a genus apart, Rosmarinus officinalis, before recent study moved the herb into the sages as Salvia rosmarinus. The old genus name means dew of the sea, for the plant's love of bright, salt-swept coastal hillsides. Slender, needle-like, deep green leaves clothe the woody stems the year round, and soft blue flowers open along them from winter into spring.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
'Arp' is the rosemary to grow where ordinary rosemary freezes out, the cold-hardiest of the common culinary rosemaries and a genuine boon to gardeners north of the herb's usual range. Selected in 1972 from a plant growing at Arp, in east Texas, by the noted herb grower Madalene Hill, this selection carries the same needle-like evergreen foliage, aromatic and useful in the kitchen, on a robust, bushy, upright frame, with the bonus of a distinct lemon note in the scent and a soft gray-green cast to the leaves.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
Among the upright rosemaries, 'Miss Jessopp's Upright' stands as the tall, columnar backbone of the herb garden, sending stiff, aromatic branches skyward in a narrow plume rather than the low sprawl of the creeping kinds. The cultivar carries the name of Euphemia Jessopp, an Edwardian gardener whose plant the great plantsman E. A. Bowles selected and passed into wider cultivation, and the shrub has been grown under her name for more than a century. Botanists have lately moved rosemary out of the old genus and into Salvia, so that the plant now answers to Salvia rosmarinus as often as to the familiar Rosmarinus officinalis, though gardeners and cooks are in no hurry to give up the older word.
Where the upright rosemaries reach for the sky, the Prostrate Rosemary lies down and flows, spilling in long, trailing, aromatic stems that pour over a wall, a bank, or the rim of a raised bed. The plant is the same species that flavors the Sunday roast, Rosmarinus officinalis, lately reclassified by botanists as Salvia rosmarinus, but grown here in a low, spreading form that trades the shrub's usual stiffness for a soft, cascading habit.
