This Stewartia is a large growing tree form with dark green leaves which turn a brilliant red in the fall. The gold-centered 3 inch white flowers typically bloom from June to July. Its marbled exfoliating bark ranges in colors from grayish-brown to orange-brown. Sometimes listed as Stewartia pseudocamellia var. koreana. The Japanese Stewartia pseudocamellia is similar but does not get as large. Stewartia should have a well-drained fertile soil with ample moisture.
Stewartia malacodendron is a much sought native deciduous shrub, and one of only two stewartias native to the United States. The species sits in Theaceae, the tea family, so the kinship with Camellia is real and visible the moment the flowers open: white, three inches across, built like a single rose, with a boss of purple-filamented stamens around blue anthers at the center. Nothing else in an American woodland looks remotely like it. The plant is found mostly on streamside slopes in rich woods and is widely scattered in spots from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, never in stands, usually as three to ten plants in a place. Bloom comes in early summer, a flower or two at a time over several weeks, and the autumn foliage turns orange to red.
Tall stewartia is an upright deciduous tree of medium size, and for most of the year the reason to grow one is the trunk. The bark sheds in thin flakes to leave a smooth surface of cinnamon and orange-brown, warm enough to pull the eye across a winter garden from some distance, and the effect only improves as the tree ages. Abundant small white flowers follow in summer and the leaves turn red and purple in fall, but the bark is the long argument. Reckon on twenty to twenty-five feet in a garden, though in the forests of Japan the species has been recorded at eighty.
This lovely flowering tree in the tea family is native to Japan. It is uncommon but is probably the Stewartia most often seen in cultivation. It is a small to medium size deciduous tree that bears large white flowers with yellow stamens and has attractive exfoliating bark and good yellow to red fall color. Plant in fertile, well-drained soil in sun or semi-shade with irrigation during dry periods. Dirr, Manual of Woody Landscape Plants describes it as " magnificent" and "a worthy tree for the garden". It is hardy and probably best suited in zones cooler than zone 8.
Beaked stewartia is one of the rarest plants in a genus that has no common members, and we are indebted to Roger Gossler of Oregon for our stock. He calls the species one of the rarest Stewartias, grown above all for the large maroon calyx that closes around the seed pods once the flowers have fallen. "Very beautiful," he says, and Gossler has grown more stewartias than most gardeners will ever see. In the garden the plant makes a deciduous, multi-stemmed shrub or small tree, pyramidal while young and rounding into an oval with age, reaching anywhere from thirteen to thirty-odd feet depending on how patient the gardener turns out to be.
This small tree of Chinese origin has showy white flowers and fall foliage that is red or reddish, and the smooth whitish trunks with exfoliating bark are an important ornamental feature. In truth the bark is the reason most people plant one. Old stems shed in thin plates to leave a polished, mottled surface in cream, buff, and cinnamon that looks best in winter when nothing distracts from it, and improves every year for decades. The flowers arrive in early summer, white and cupped, about two inches across with a central boss of yellow stamens, unmistakably the work of a relative of Camellia. Then autumn brings a clean red. Very few small trees do three distinct things this well.
Thick, dark green foliage and good growth make this Stewartia collected in Yunnan, China, a very promising new plant for southern gardens. We have not been able to locate information on its flowers, ultimate size or hardiness.
Stokesia laevis is one of those rare native perennials that marries toughness with elegance, a plant that has stood its ground in the Southeastern pinelands for ages yet looks as though it belongs in the most refined cottage border. Native to the sandy, open woods and pine savannas of the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Gulf coastal plain, this Stokes' aster rises each spring from tidy, semi-evergreen rosettes of glossy leaves before sending up broad, fringed flowers in shades of sky blue, lavender, or soft cream.
Stokes Aster is a hardy perennial with dark evergreen leaves which provide beautiful greenery during the winter months. The large daisy type flowers typically bloom in summer and are blue in the typical form but white in this one. These plants are often used in formal gardens and need well-drained soil and sunlight. Stokes Aster is native to the southern U.S. but while they are widely cultivated they are uncommon in the wild.
Stokes'Aster is probably much more common in cultivation than in the wild. This most unusual selection of this choice native perennial has flower stalks up to 4 feet tall! Discovered in Georgia by Ron and Sue Dieterman of Atlanta Botanic Garden. Wild plants at original locality apparently now destroyed by development. (See ARM)
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.
