Products

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A glossy-leaved small evergreen in the Witchhazel family. Curious-looking yellow-red flowers in winter. Shade tolerant. (See DIR)

Hardiness

Zones 7–9

Rare evergreen tree or shrub from China. Witchhazel relative with smaller more leathery leaves than S. sinensis. Probably hardy.

Hardiness

Zones 8–9

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.

Hardiness

Zones 6–9

Light

Full Sun

Height

2–4 ft.

Spread

2–3 ft.

Bloom

Purple

Plant type

Perennial

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.

Hardiness

Zones 6–8

Light

Full Sun / Part Shade

Height

1–3 ft.

Spread

1–2 ft.

Bloom

Purple

Plant type

Perennial

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.

Hardiness

Zones 3–8

Light

Full Sun / Part Shade

Height

2–3 ft.

Spread

2–3 ft.

Bloom

Purple

Plant type

Perennial

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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.

Hardiness

Zones 5–8

Height

1–2 ft.

Spread

3–4 ft.

(See HRT)

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.

Hardiness

Zones 7–9

Height

25–30 ft.

Spread

12–18 ft.

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.

Hardiness

Zones 3–8

Light

Full Sun / Part Shade

Height

4–5 ft.

Spread

4–6 ft.

Bloom

Purple

Plant type

Shrub

Multistemed, upright arching shrub.

Hardiness

Zones 3–8

From seed collected in China.

Copper Canyon daisy is a big, aromatic, autumn-flowering marigold from the mountains of southern Arizona and adjacent northern Mexico, grown as much for the scent as the show. Brush against the finely divided, fern-like foliage and the plant releases a strong, distinctive fragrance, a mix of citrus, anise, and marigold that some find intoxicating and others frankly pungent. Tagetes lemmonii builds a soft, shrubby mound three to four feet high and wider still.

Hardiness

Zones 8–11

Light

Full Sun

Height

3–4 ft.

Spread

4–6 ft.

Bloom

Yellow

Plant type

Shrub

Traditional use

digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, pain relief

Tagetes lucida is the herb that does it all. Known as Mexican tarragon, Mexican mint marigold, pericón, and, in the old Aztec tongue, yauhtli, this fragrant perennial from Mexico and Central America earns every name. The narrow, glossy, deep-green leaves carry a warm anise-tarragon scent and flavor, and in late summer and fall the plant scatters small, single, golden-yellow marigold flowers across a tidy foot-and-a-half mound.

Hardiness

Zones 8–11

Light

Full Sun / Part Shade

Height

15–20 in.

Spread

6–10 in.

Bloom

Yellow

Plant type

Perennial

Traditional use

digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, respiratory support, pain relief

Rare conifer from mountains of Taiwan. Resembles Cryptomeria but more pendulous branches and twigs. Leaves like short stiff needles. A graceful large evergreen tree but may grow slowly and rarely reach full size in cultivation.

Hardiness

Zones 8–9

Height

70–90 ft.

Spread

30–40 ft.

Imagine a shrub that looks like a conifer caught in an airy, pink-flowering daydream. Tamarix ramosissima, often called tamarisk or saltcedar, is a deciduous shrub or small tree with fine, scale-like leaves that read as cedar from ten feet away, yet drop in winter. That contradiction is the charm: conifer-like texture on a plant that is no conifer at all.

Hardiness

Zones 3–8

Light

Full Sun

Height

15–20 ft.

Spread

15–20 ft.

Bloom

Pink

Plant type

Shrub

Pond cypress is the quieter of the two native bald cypresses, a deciduous conifer closely related to the more widespread Taxodium distichum but smaller, tidier, and distinct in leaf. Where bald cypress wears soft, feather-like foliage, pond cypress carries fine, scale-like leaves pressed close and ascending along the shoots, giving the young tree a narrow, almost columnar, pyramidal outline.

Hardiness

Zones 5–10

Light

Full Sun / Part Shade

Height

40–60 ft.

Spread

18–25 ft.

Plant type

Conifer

Bald cypress is the great deciduous conifer of the southern swamp, a long-lived, stately tree of river margins, bottomlands, and blackwater sloughs across the southern United States, and one of the most beautiful native trees the region has to offer. Soft, feathery, two-ranked needles clothe the branches in a light, bright green through summer, then turn a warm russet-orange and fall, leaving a broad, pyramidal frame bare for winter.

Hardiness

Zones 5–10

Light

Full Sun / Part Shade

Height

60–100 ft.

Spread

40–60 ft.

Plant type

Conifer

Taxodium mucronatum has shorter leaves and larger cones than Taxodium disticum (which see). Could grow to be a very large tree if well sited as the famous tree "El Tule" in Oaxaca, Mexico is the largest tree in the world (trunk diameter). The native range of this tree is generally given as Mexico north to lower Rio Grande River in Texas. This species is evergreen or nearly so in warmer regions.

Hardiness

Zones 8–10

Height

35–60 ft.

Spread

30–50 ft.