Stokes Aster is a hardy perennial with dark evergreen leaves which provide beautiful greenery during the winter months. The large blue daisy type flowers typically bloom in summer. These plants are often used in formal gardens and need well-drained soil and sunlight. Stokesia is native to the southern U.S. but while they are widely cultivated they are uncommon in the wild. This selection from Peachie Saxon's garden in Mississippi is compact and very floriferous. The flower color is vivid blue lavender.
Normally a large evergreen or semi-evergreen shrub but can apparently become a small tree. Laurel-like leaves. Clusters of white flowers in summer are followed by red berries. These plants from seed wild collected in western China probably represent the 'salicifolia'type. Related to Photinia. Prefers well-drained, slightly acidic soil.
American snowbell is one of the quiet delights of the Southeastern wetlands, usually a graceful multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, though the plant can be trained up into a small single-trunked tree. Along streamsides and in low, wet ground from the coastal plain through the interior South, the shrub carries slender branches that hang, in spring, with rows of small, bell-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant and nodding on fine stalks so the whole plant seems trimmed in tiny lanterns.
To see Styrax japonicus properly you have to look up. The leaves ride along the tops of the branches, all turned to the sky, while underneath, in late spring, hang rows of small white bells on slender stalks, so the whole horizontal tier of the tree seems lit from below. Stand beneath one in bloom and the common name explains itself.
Styrax obassia, the fragrant snowbell, is the bold-leaved cousin of the more familiar Japanese snowbell, a small deciduous tree from the mountain woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China. Where Styrax japonicus hides small bells beneath fine, layered branches, the fragrant snowbell wears large, rounded, almost tropical leaves up to eight inches across, and hangs long, drooping chains of white, bell-shaped flowers that carry a sweet perfume through the late-spring garden.
The Sunquat began as an accident in a Beeville, Texas dooryard in the early 1940s, when a man named Leslie Cude noticed a seedling carrying fruit that looked like a small lemon and behaved like a kumquat. Walter Swingle, the great citrus authority of the day, took one look and guessed a cross of Meyer lemon and kumquat, which is where the name Lemonquat comes from and how it entered the collections as Citrus limon × Fortunella. The trouble is that the curators who have kept the tree at Riverside ever since have come to doubt him. The fruit, they think, points to a mandarin somewhere in the parentage rather than a lemon, which would make the plant a mandarinquat wearing the wrong label. Nobody has settled the question. The plant has gone out as Sunquat, Lemonquat, Lemondrop, and Marmaladequat, four names for one tree, each a different theory and not one of them proven. Asking a citrus to hold still long enough to be classified rather misunderstands the family.
Queen Palm is a tall elegant pinnate leaf palm native from Brazil to northern Argentina. It is a common large palm in Florida landscapes and popular in many warmer regions. It is a relatively fast-growing palm with long graceful arching bright green fronds. Most of those in cultivation are likely of Brazilian origin and of limited cold hardiness. This selection from our palm guru friend Tom McClendon are seedlings from his tree from Uruguay in St. Marys Georgia and may be a bit more cold hardy and worth trying in areas just a bit too cold for the Queen Palms commonly available.
In the open oak-hickory woodlands and fire-maintained savannas that once covered the upland South, Georgia aster was a fixture, a late-season native sending up violet-blue flowers in October and November at the precise moment when almost everything else had finished. That landscape is largely gone now, and the aster went with most of it.
A native aster with a regional accent. Most of the asters Americans plant are wide-ranging species that turn up from Maine to Texas and read essentially the same wherever they grow. Symphyotrichum grandiflorum is more particular, with a native range small and specific: the Atlantic Coastal Plain of Virginia and the Carolinas, plus the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and little more. A few hundred miles of sandy roadsides, dry pine-oak woods, abandoned fields, and forest edges from the Tidewater into the rolling country west of the fall line. For a gardener in the Carolinas or Georgia, this is one of the few asters that is genuinely here, a piece of the actual Atlantic Coastal Plain flora rather than a borrowed prairie species filling in for a missing native.
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium, the aromatic aster, saves the best of the season for last. Long after most perennials have folded, this tough native throws up a low, spreading mound of stiff, well-branched stems and buries the whole clump under small violet-blue daisies, each lit with a bright gold eye, from early fall well into November. The show arrives just as the garden goes quiet, and the flowers hum with the last bees and butterflies of the year.
Comfrey is a large-leafed deciduous groundcover. Best in moist, shade but will grow in drier soils. This variety, believed to be a hybrid, has lovely tubular light blue flowrs. Armitage (Herbaceous Perennial Plants) says: "Some of the clearest and prettiest blue flowers in the plant kingdom occur in this genus". Native to and long cultivated in Europe.
Sweetleaf or Horse Sugar is a small tree with simple slightly toothed deciduous to persistent leaves 4-5 inches long and 1 inch wide. It flowers in very early spring with axillary clusters of fuzzy yellow flowers that can be quite showy. The smooth gray streaked bark is attractive. This ornamental small tree is widespread in woodlands in the southern U.S. coastal plain but is rarely available from nurseries as it is not easy to propagate or transplant. It thrives in better quality sandy soils in sun or semi shade.
Syringa meyeri 'Palibin', the dwarf Korean lilac, is a Southern-friendly lilac with old-world charm and clouds of spring fragrance. For gardeners who have long admired the lilac's perfume but found themselves too far south to grow one with confidence, this compact deciduous shrub offers the romance of the traditional lilacs, dense clusters of icy-pink to pale lavender bloom, without the northern fussiness.
