This attractive small-medium deciduous tree has compound leaves dark green leaves, and white spring flowers that are followed by clusters of marble-sized yellow fruits. The fruits are rich in saponin and can lather like soap in water. This rare tree with golden fall foliage is found in woodlands on calcareous soils at widely scattered sites in southern Georgia and Florida. It is rare in cultivation and almost unknown in the nursery trade.
Sapium japonicum is a medium size deciduous shrub or small tree. The oval leaves suggestive of a Magnolia are unlike the widely naturalized (and invasive!) Chinese Tallowtree (Sapium sebiferum) which was introduced by Thomas Jefferson. The Japanese tallowtree is little-known in the U.S. but is an attractive ornamental notable for attractive foliage and good orange-red fall color. It should be planted in well-drained but moist soil in a sunny location. Native to eastern Asia.
This plant is a botanical time machine. Sarcandra glabra belongs to the Chloranthaceae, a flowering-plant family with only four surviving genera worldwide and a fossil record reaching back into the Early Cretaceous, more than a hundred million years ago. Pollen and floral fossils of the Chloranthaceae are among the earliest evidence of flowering plants anywhere on Earth, and the family was already abundant when the dinosaurs were only in their middle age. Today Sarcandra is one of just four genera left from a lineage that once spread across what is now Portugal, Spain, and eastern North America, and most of that Cretaceous diversity is gone. The little plant in the garden is a quiet survivor of a family that mostly did not make it.
Sarcococca confusa, sweet box, is one of the great winter-fragrance shrubs, a compact evergreen of the boxwood family grown for a perfume out of all proportion to the flowers that carry it. In the depths of winter the small, tassel-like, creamy white flowers open along the stems, tucked among the leaves and easy to miss by eye, but their sweet, honeyed scent carries yards on a mild day and stops passersby in their tracks.
A spreading, half hardy evergreen shrub with fragrant flowers and narrow, glossy leaves. It grows well in shade and is related to Boxwood. Not susceptible to diseases and insects. Displays high drought tolerance once established. Native to western China.
Sarcococca orientalis is a fragrant, uncommon sweet box from China, a compact evergreen of the boxwood family grown, like its kin, for a winter perfume far larger than the flowers that carry it. In late winter small white flowers open along the stems, modest to the eye but richly and sweetly scented, filling a still, mild day with fragrance and giving the shade garden a lift when little else stirs.
Sarcococca ruscifolia, the fragrant sweet box, is an evergreen shrub of the boxwood family, native to China and East Asia, grown for a winter perfume that belies the tiny flowers that carry it. In late winter and early spring the small, creamy white flowers open along the glossy stems, easy to overlook by eye but powerfully sweet on the air, and unlike the black-fruited sweet boxes, this species follows the flowers with glowing red berries.
Evergreen shrub with milk-white flowers and dark red fruits. Prefers warmer climates and shade. Leaves are suggestive of Ruscus and are glossy. Related to Boxwood.
Upright wide spreading.evergreen shrub with distinctive willow-like narrow leaves. Unlike but related to Boxwood. Dark purple to black fruit. This species from the western Himalayas is very little known and seldom available from nurseries in the U.S. Perhaps a bit less cold hardy than some of the other Sarcococca species but a good plant for shady garden areas in the Deep South.
A Wodlanders introduction collected by Frank Bell in Yunnan, China, this sweet box appears much like Sarcococca hookerana and may be S. hookeriana digyna. We are giving you an opportunity to test and evaluate it along with us. Related to Boxwood, glossy leafed, shade-demanding evergreens.
Among the winter-flowering shade shrubs, few reward a cold-season garden as generously as Sarcococca wallichii, the Himalayan sweet box. The genus name joins the Greek sarco, flesh, with kokkos, berry, a nod to the fleshy fruits that follow the flowers, while the species honors Nathaniel Wallich, the Danish surgeon-botanist who superintended the Calcutta botanic garden in the early nineteenth century and sent so many Himalayan plants west. Sarcococca belongs to the box family, Buxaceae, and shares that clan's patience: dense, slow, and evergreen, with the quiet good manners of a plant built for the long haul.
Pitcher Plants are unusual carnivirous plants in which the leaves are modified into tall, usually upright hooded cylinders. Small insects are attracted to and are trapped in liquid that is in the base of these tubes. These plants grow in damp to wet acid, nutrient poor soils in sunny to slightly shady locations. They derive nutrients from the trapped and digested insects Sweet Pitcher Plant is one of a number of species that occur in the southeastern U.S. Dark red umbrella like flowers on tall stems are followed by rounded seed pods. These plants are widely propagated, grown, and hybridized by carnivirous plant enthusiasts but they do require special cultural conditions. Growing Pitcher Plants is covered in detail on many websites. Most Pitcher Plants are becomming rare and some are endangered through loss of habitat.
Few native trees announce themselves as cheerfully as Sassafras albidum, whose leaves come in three shapes on the same branch: an unlobed oval, a two-lobed mitten, and a three-lobed silhouette like a splayed hand. A member of the laurel family, Lauraceae, and kin to bay, cinnamon, and spicebush, sassafras carries aromatic oils in every part, so that a snapped twig or crushed leaf releases a warm, root-beer sweetness. The common name traces back through Spanish to the colonial Southeast, where the tree was among the first American plants shipped to Europe as a marketable medicine.
A number of trees in the genus Schima are native to the Far East and their taxonomy is confused. A number of different ones have been introduced in recent years but they are still little-known in the U.S. These evergreen trees are in the Tea family and have white flowers suggestive of the related Stewartia, Gordonia, Polyspora, etc. Schima argentea has relatively thin simple leaves which are rather long pointed. The leaf undersides are quite glaucous with a gray to white color. These we offer are propagated from a specimen we have in the Aiken Citywide Arboretum which has proven hardy here through recent winters. Dr. Ranney at NC State University Horticultural Experiment Station has produced hybrids between this plant and Franklinia which are called "Schimlinia" Plant in good soil that is moist but well-drained in a semi shady site.
Schima superba is a beautiful evergreen Asian tree with no English common name. It is in the Tea family so related to Camellia, Gordonia, Stewartia, etc. It has lanceolate leaves 5-6 inches long. The new growth is red-bronze. Flowers are white and several inches in diameter. Our trees were grown from seed collected in Taiwan by our freind Mark Krautmann of Heritage Seedlings. We have seen several thriving specimens of this tree in the southeastern U.S. and expect it to become much more well-known and widely grown here.
×Schimlinia floribunda is one of the rarest woody plants a gardener can grow: a deliberate intergeneric hybrid between two members of the tea family, Theaceae, uniting the fabled Franklinia alatamaha with the Asian evergreen Schima argentea. The cross marries the ornamental drama and hardiness of Franklinia with the vigor, adaptability, and evergreen constitution of Schima, and the result carries large, camellia-like white flowers, glossy foliage, and an upright, well-furnished frame. The hybrid formula name honors both parents at once, Schima and Franklinia folded into a single word.
Medium sized tree with persistent compound leaves and winged seeds very much like a maple. May be a good candidate for dry rocky slopes in mild areas which resemble collection site in Sierra de Cordoba, Argentina.
Evergreen shrub with long willowly branches and simple, toothed, glossy leaves. A very attractive shrub from higher elevation area in Tucuman Province, Argentina. Flowers probably small yellow. Fruit are small purple berries on female plants. It has overwintered here with no damage. A Woodlanders introduction.
