Sabal louisiana, the Louisiana Palmetto, is best pictured as a dwarf palmetto grown large. Where the familiar Sabal minor stays stemless, this palm builds a stout trunk in time and carries broad, blue-green, fan-shaped leaves on a far more robust frame, which is why the plant has been passed back and forth in the books, treated sometimes as a form of Sabal minor and sometimes as a hybrid with Sabal texana.
Sabal mexicana, the Texas Palmetto, is a large, robust fan palm once known as Sabal texana. In the United States the palm is native to the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and formerly ranged northward along the south Texas Gulf coast, while the wider distribution reaches through eastern Mexico into Central America. The species resembles the cabbage palmetto of the Southeast but reads as heavier and more massive, and the much larger seed is the surest way to tell the two apart.
Sabal minor, the Dwarf Palmetto, is the hardiest of the native fan palms and the one most gardeners can grow. The palm stays essentially stemless, holding a low fountain of stiff, blue-green, fan-shaped leaves straight from the ground, with the growing point set safely at or below the surface. Erect fruiting stalks rise well above the foliage and carry small black fruit about a quarter inch across.
Sabal palmetto, the Cabbage Palmetto, is the classic palm of the Southeastern coast and the State Tree of both South Carolina and Florida. Blue-green, costapalmate (fan) leaves crown a straight trunk that thickens to about a foot and a half across, and the whole reads as the very image of the coastal South. The palm grows commonly to around thirty feet and climbs considerably taller in Florida.
Sabal rosei, the Llano Palm, is a handsome fan palm from the Pacific side of Mexico, ranging through the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco, where the palm covers the coastal plains, the llanos, by the hundred thousand. Thick, blue-green, leathery fan leaves give the plant a bold, sculptural quality, and the slim, straight trunk is either patterned with a neat spiral of old leaf bases or swept clean to reveal the ring-like scars beneath.
Sabatia dodecandra var. kennedyana, the Plymouth rose-gentian, is a globally rare perennial wildflower of the gentian family, treasured for large, starry, rose-pink flowers carried on slender stalks above a low basal rosette. Each bloom opens flat to nine, ten, or eleven clear pink petals around a yellow eye ringed in red, a jewel-like design more often expected of a cultivated exotic than a native pondshore plant. The genus name honors Liberato Sabbati, an eighteenth-century Italian botanist, while the epithet kennedyana remembers the botanist George Golding Kennedy, whose name the older common name, Kennedy's marsh pink, carries still.
Sageretia minutiflora, the shellmound buckthorn, is a rare and little-known native shrub of the Southeastern coast, with scandent, half-climbing, somewhat spiny branches and small, glossy, faintly triangular leaves. The habit falls between shrub and vine, so the plant can be left to mound and tangle or trained up a fence or arbor, and the fine, dark, semi-evergreen foliage gives a handsome year-round texture in the mild coastal gardens where the species thrives.
Sageretia theezans, the Chinese sweet plum, is a graceful evergreen shrub of the buckthorn family, native to southern China, where the plant grows to some three to eight feet with fine, zigzagging branches, small glossy leaves, and a handsome flaking, multicolored trunk. New growth often emerges bronze before settling to deep green, and in the mild-winter gardens that suit the species the foliage holds the year round, giving a dense, fine-textured presence rare in so tough a plant.
Salix chaenomeloides, the Japanese pussy willow, is a fast-growing shrub or small tree native to Japan, Korea, and parts of China, long valued in East Asian gardens for the show the plant makes in the depths of winter. Well before the leaves break, the bare branches set fat, silvery-white catkins with a soft, velvety nap, the largest and most striking of any pussy willow, and the branches are cut by the armful for early-spring arrangements.
Salix eriocephala, the heart-leaved or Missouri River willow, is a graceful native shrub, sometimes a modest multi-stemmed tree, of riverbanks and wet meadows across northern and eastern North America. The plant rises on several trunks clad in coarse gray bark, reaching roughly eight to a dozen feet in the garden and more in wild thickets, and the epithet eriocephala, meaning woolly-headed, points to the soft, silky catkins that give the willow much of its charm.
Salix integra 'Hakuro Nishiki', the dappled willow, is an elegant small willow grown above all for the show its new growth makes in spring. As the shoots unfold, the glossy leaves emerge splashed and mottled in pink and creamy white, so freely that the whole plant reads as a soft cloud of blossom-pink from a distance, before the variegation settles to green and white through summer. The Japanese cultivar name, roughly white-dappled brocade, catches the effect exactly.
The willows gave the world its first painkiller. Willow bark, steeped by Greek and Native American healers alike for fever and ache, carries salicin, the compound nineteenth-century chemists refined into salicylic acid and, in time, aspirin, which still wears the genus name buried in the chemistry. This particular willow comes by a quieter trade. Salix koriyanagi is the Korean basket willow, the name meaning just that, long grown across Korea, Japan, and China for slender rods woven into baskets and furniture by hands that wanted something straight, supple, and strong.
Salix nigra, the black willow, is the largest native willow of North America and a common deciduous tree of Southern wetlands, but 'Webb' is a strikingly different, vase-shaped form that gathers those loose, streamside branches into a small, dense, upright tree. The habit sets the selection apart at once, tidy and shapely where the wild black willow sprawls, while keeping all the toughness and easy water-loving vigor of the species.
Salix tristis is a dwarf, gray-leaved native willow and one of the most surprising members of a genus most gardeners picture standing knee-deep in water. This small, tidy shrub was originally collected by Woodlanders in Jefferson County, Florida, where the plant grew in pine flatwoods on well-drained, even dry, sandy sites, the opposite of the streambank home most willows keep. The soft, grayish, woolly-hairy leaves and neat, low frame set the willow apart at a glance.
Salvia darcyi, the Galeana sage, is a bold Mexican sage grown for one of the purest scarlets in the whole tribe of salvias, a color that reads across a garden and pulls hummingbirds from a distance. Through the heat of summer and well into fall, upright spikes of large, bright orange-red flowers rise above a mound of soft, gray-green, heart-shaped leaves that release a clean minty scent when brushed. Few tender salvias give so long or so vivid a show.
Salvia 'Indigo Spires' is a big, free-flowering hybrid sage grown for the long, tapering wands of violet-blue bloom it throws from early summer straight through to frost. Each spike packs small, rich violet flowers tightly in whorls above dark, near-black calyces, and the spikes lengthen and curve as the season goes, so a settled clump reads as a haze of deep blue-purple for months on end. Few perennials give so much color for so long a run.
Salvia greggii 'Furman's Red' is a small, woody sage grown for a long, generous run of deep, true-red flowers that carry from early summer straight through fall. The tubular, two-lipped blooms glow against fine, dark green, aromatic leaves, and few small shrubs bloom so steadily for so little trouble, feeding hummingbirds and bees the whole time.
Salvia greggii 'Rachel' is an uncommon white-flowered form of the autumn sage, the normally red-flowered small shrub of the Texas and Mexican borderlands, and the plant came to Woodlanders from the Texas plantsman Greg Grant. The clean white flowers are a soft surprise in a species best known for scarlet, and 'Rachel' carries a second twist as well: the leaves are lightly variegated, speckled and dusted with cream, so the plant reads bright even out of bloom.
'Cherry Queen' is a North Carolina-bred salvia from one of the most important salvia hybridizers America has produced. The cross is a deliberate one, between Salvia greggii, the autumn sage of the Texas and Mexican borderlands, prized for drought tolerance and a six-month bloom, and Salvia blepharophylla, a Mexican species whose name, eyelash-leaved sage, comes from the tiny fringe of hairs at the edge of each leaf (Greek blepharon, eyelash, and phylla, leaves). Blepharophylla carries the most saturated, signal-bright red flower in the whole genus, but the plant spreads by stolons in ways most gardeners do not want and resents cold winters, while greggii brings the bones and the durability. The breeder who put the two together was Dr. Richard "Rich" Dufresne of Candor, North Carolina, an organic chemist who became, more or less by accident, the leading American breeder of woody salvias for the eastern climate. Dufresne died in December 2018, leaving a body of work that includes 'Cherry Chief', 'Maraschino', and this selection, which Plant Delights Nursery called the most brilliant red they had ever seen on any hardy salvia.
Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue' is a big, vigorous perennial sage grown for one of the truest blues in the garden, a deep gentian to cobalt held in near-black calyces that give the selection its name. Through the warm months, tall spikes rise above soft, hairy, deep green leaves and open in a long, generous run, and few hardy perennials offer a blue this saturated for so long a season.
