Prunus umbellata, the flatwoods plum, is a picturesque small deciduous tree native to well-drained soils across the southeastern United States. Where the Chickasaw plum forms suckering thickets, the flatwoods plum grows as a single, gnarled, small tree with rough, dark bark and a wide, open crown, an old-field and fence-row character that reads as quietly beautiful in age.
Chinese quince is one of those trees that seems to offer something beautiful at every turn. Soft pink flowers arrive in spring, dark green leaves carry the tree through summer, and fall brings warm color along with large, fragrant fruit. Even in winter the peeling bark gives a quiet kind of beauty.
Pseudolarix kaempferi, better known by the synonym Pseudolarix amabilis and the common name golden larch, is a rare, slow-growing deciduous conifer native to eastern China. Despite the name, the golden larch is not a true larch but the sole member of its own genus, Pseudolarix, prized for a graceful broad-pyramidal form, soft texture, and a brilliant golden fall color that rivals any maple or ginkgo.
Ptelea trifoliata, the hop tree or wafer ash, is a unique and underappreciated native, a small, bushy deciduous tree of eastern and central North America. Highly adaptable, the plant takes dry, rocky ground as readily as moist, well-drained sites, which makes the hop tree a fine choice for naturalized landscapes, pollinator gardens, and woodland edges.
This Asian fern has fronds with narrow strap-like pinnae. It is widely naturalized in warm regions where it often grows in cracks of old masonry walls and other spots with high calcium soils such as moist shady spots along foundations, etc.
The little epaulette tree is a rare small deciduous tree or large shrub from eastern Asia, and the common name is the best description anyone has managed. In late spring and early summer the branch tips hang with drooping panicles of small fragrant white flowers, and the effect really is of fringed military shoulder boards swinging from the ends of the branches. The leaves are ovate and bristle-toothed, the habit open and spreading, and the whole tree has an unforced elegance that the heavier flowering trees never quite reach.
The fragrant epaulette tree is a deciduous tree of twenty to thirty feet in most gardens, spreading and open in habit, and the performance comes in late spring and early summer when long panicles of small white flowers hang from the ends of the branches and scent the air around the tree. Dirr's Manual of Woody Landscape Plants puts the case plainly: "the flowers are extremely handsome and develop when a limited number of plants are offering color." That timing is much of the value. By June most of the flowering trees have finished and the garden has gone green, and this one is only starting.
Punica granatum 'California Sunset' turns the pomegranate into something closer to a florist's confection. The flowers arrive fully double, coral to salmon-red and streaked with creamy white, each one fluted and ruffled like an old boutonniere carnation rather than the tidy scarlet trumpet of the wild species. Because the petals are packed so tightly, the flowers rarely set fruit, which is precisely the point: this is a pomegranate grown for the long parade of bloom from early summer into fall, not for the leathery globes at the end of the season.
Punica granatum 'Toyosho' answers a question few think to ask of a pomegranate: what if the flower, not the fruit, were the whole point? The blooms are fully double and carnation-like, as much as three inches across, in warm shades of peach, apricot, and soft salmon, with the crimped, tissue-paper texture of an old-fashioned boutonniere. So many petals crowd each flower that pollination becomes nearly impossible, so 'Toyosho' seldom fruits, spending the long summer instead in an unhurried procession of bloom.
This is the pomegranate grown the old way, for the fruit. Punica granatum is a deciduous Middle Eastern shrub of narrow, glossy leaves and vivid orange-red flowers, followed by the large, leathery-skinned, garnet-seeded fruits for which the plant has been cultivated since antiquity. Woodlanders raised this particular selection from seed of a good fruiting specimen in upstate South Carolina, and the plant may well represent 'Wonderful', the widely grown commercial variety, proven here as a dependable cropper in the southern garden.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, heart support, general wellness, topical applications
There are pomegranates grown for fruit, and pomegranates grown for flowers, and then there is 'Eight Ball', grown for sheer astonishment. Where the species bears globes the color of garnets, Punica granatum 'Eight Ball' ripens fruit so dark, round, and dusky that the pomegranates look dipped in coal, closer to the ball the cultivar is named for than to anything in the produce aisle. The color runs bone-deep: the fruit is so loaded with anthocyanin pigment that even the cambium beneath the bark shows purple.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–10 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, heart support, general wellness, topical applications
If any native perennial could be said to hum, the honor would go to Pycnanthemum muticum. From mid to late summer the blunt mountain mint gathers a shimmer of broad, silver-frosted bracts at the top of every stem, and within them open dense heads of tiny pink-to-white flowers that draw an almost comic density of life: bees of every kind, wasps, butterflies, skippers, moths, and flies working the nectar from dawn to dusk. In a three-year Penn State study that monitored eighty-six species, no plant drew a greater number and diversity of pollinators.
Where blunt mountain mint is all broad silver, Pycnanthemum tenuifolium is the slender cousin, a fine-textured native built from wiry stems and narrow, almost needle-thin leaves. From midsummer into early fall the plant clouds over with flat-topped clusters of tiny white to pale lavender flowers, faintly purple-speckled, and the effect at a distance is a low haze of bloom. What the flowers lack in size they make up in draw: bees, small butterflies, wasps, and beneficial insects work the nectar in numbers that make narrowleaf mountain mint one of the most valuable pollinator plants of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, topical applications
The berries are the whole argument. Where most firethorns load their branches with orange and scarlet, this clone ripens to a clean clear yellow, abundant and unusually persistent, holding well after the red-fruited kinds have been picked over by birds. The foliage is relatively small, glossy, and evergreen, which gives the shrub a tidier and far less coarse look than the genus normally manages. Flat clusters of small white flowers cover the branches in late spring and are worked hard by bees. The thorns are entirely real and should be respected.
Pyracomeles vilmorinii is the sort of plant collectors trade knowing looks over, a small, fine-textured evergreen so uncommon that most gardeners have never met one. The little leaves are cut into narrow, fern-like divisions along arching, thornless branches, and in spring flat clusters of small white flowers give way by autumn to a scatter of coral-red fruits. The overall effect is airy and delicate, unusual in an evergreen shrub.
Pyrrosia lingua 'Kei Kan' is a fern for people who think they do not like ferns. Nothing here is lacy or feathery. The fronds are thick, leathery, and strap-shaped, and in this selection the tips fork and crest into ragged, comb-like divisions, the feature that earns the Japanese name Kei Kan, meaning cockscomb. The overall effect is closer to a piece of green leather sculpture than to the soft filigree most people picture when they hear the word fern.
Quercus acerifolia is one of the rarest oaks in North America, and one of the most quietly beautiful. The name says the first thing you notice: acerifolia means maple-leaved, and the upper leaves really do look like a sugar maple's, often as wide as they are long, cut into three to five sharp, glossy lobes that turn deep red and burgundy in fall. A close relative of the Shumard oak, maple-leaf oak grows as anything from a stunted, multi-trunked shrub on a windswept ridge to a single-trunked tree of forty or fifty feet in cultivation.
Quercus acutissima 'Gobbler' is a deciduous dense, broad, oval-rounded to broad-rounded tree with low-slung, wide-spreading branches. The cultivar Gobbler is the result of open-pollinated progeny that produce early and abundant acorns. One of the fastest growing oaks, especially in youth. Thrives in the heat of the South. Plant in well-drained, acidic soil but, also adaptable to other types of soil. This species is often confused with Chestnut because of leaf similarity. New Spring foliage is brilliant yellow to golden yellow. Often planted for wildlife especially wild turkeys which consume the acorns. It is also used as a shade or lawn tree. Quercus acutissima is native to eastern Asia.
Quercus agrifolia, the coast live oak, is the evergreen oak of the California coast, the gnarled, dark-canopied tree that shades the golden hills of Steinbeck country and spreads heavy limbs over ranchland and canyon. The holly-like leaves are small, thick, and leathery, glossy dark green above with a spiny-toothed edge, and the tree holds them year round, casting the deep, cool shade that is the plant's signature. Left room, coast live oak builds a broad, low, romantically crooked crown.
Quercus alba, the white oak, is the grandfather of the eastern forest, a slow, massive, long-lived tree that can stand for centuries and outlast the people who plant them. The most famous of all was the Wye Oak of Wye Mills, Maryland, a single white oak that stood for more than four hundred and sixty years and served as Maryland's state tree until a storm brought the giant down in 2002. The broad, rounded crown, the pale, scaly, ash-gray bark, and the deeply lobed, blue-green leaves are the picture most people carry of an oak.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
50–80 ft.
Spread
50–80 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
