'Miss Ruby' is the butterfly bush that finally cracked the color barrier: a striking, near-sterile hybrid of Buddleia davidii and Buddleia globosa carrying racemes of bright, purplish pink, a magenta few other butterfly bushes can touch. The shrub was bred by Dr. Dennis Werner at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina, the source of our cuttings.
Buddleia davidii 'Attraction' is a more compact butterfly bush than the usual run of the species, forming a rounded shrub of arching branches lined with gray-green leaves. From summer into fall, royal red, fragrant flowers gather in nodding panicles six to ten inches long, drawing butterflies and bees in profusion.
Buddleia lindleyana, Lindley's butterfly bush, is the elegant outlier of the genus, an open, arching shrub from China hung in summer with long, slender, gracefully curved racemes of purple-violet flowers. Where most butterfly bushes carry stiff cone-shaped panicles, this one drapes, the curving spikes nodding from the tips of the branches from June until frost.
Buddleia loricata, the mountain sagewood, is a rugged evergreen from the high Drakensberg of South Africa and Lesotho, and one of the hardiest of all the butterfly bushes. Unlike the familiar deciduous buddlejas, this species holds narrow, crinkled, sage-like leaves the year round, dark green above and felted silvery white beneath. The species epithet loricata means clad in mail or armored, a nod to that tough, quilted foliage, while the genus honors the English clergyman-botanist Adam Buddle.
A yellow-flowered butterfly bush, Buddleia x weyeriana 'Honeycomb' is a vigorous hybrid of Buddleia globosa and Buddleia davidii that the great Dr. Michael Dirr judged better than the older 'Sungold'. The plant came to Dirr from Crathes Castle Garden in Scotland, bought as the variety 'E.H. Wilson' but proving to be a very different and superior yellow butterfly bush, named 'Honeycomb' and a standout in Georgia trials, flowering as late as Thanksgiving.
Endemic to the mountain scrub of Madagascar, where the plant scrambles along slopes between two and six thousand feet, Buddleja madagascariensis throws out long arching canes that will climb to ten feet given a wall to lean on. The flowers come in late winter and spring on terminal panicles up to ten inches long, opening deep yellow and aging through orange to soft pink along the same spike, all of it carrying a honeyed fragrance strong enough to scent a courtyard. The leaves are narrowly ovate, dark green above, silvery and felted beneath, so the whole shrub seems to flicker when wind moves through the canes.
Buddleja salviifolia, the sage-leaf butterfly bush, is a medium to large evergreen shrub from the sun-soaked hillsides of South Africa, and despite the exotic origin the plant has proven remarkably hardy in southeastern gardens, coming through winters at the University of Georgia's Athens trials with quiet resilience.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Butia capitata, the Pindo Palm, is the hardiest of the feather-leaf palms and the one most often seen along the Southeastern coast, planted northward as far as Virginia Beach. Long, curving, blue-green pinnate fronds arch from a trunk that thickens to about a foot and a half across, and in summer the palm hangs heavy clusters of orange, plum-flavored fruit, edible and sweet, each holding a seed like a miniature coconut. The old trade name Cocos australis still turns up in nursery lists. Native to southern Brazil and Uruguay.
Butia eriospatha, the Woolly Jelly Palm, comes from the cool highlands of southern Brazil, in Paraná and Santa Catarina, where frost is an ordinary part of winter. The name records the thick rusty wool that covers the flower spathe before the bloom opens. In the garden the palm is close kin to the Pindo, with the same arching blue-green feather fronds and plum-flavored fruit, but a stiffer, more compact crown and, by most accounts, a degree or two more cold tolerance, which is why palm collectors in the upper South went looking for seed.
This hybrid crosses the common Pindo Palm, Butia capitata, with the uncommon Chilean Wine Palm, Jubaea chilensis, and takes the best of each: the Pindo's cold tolerance and the Wine Palm's heft, with a stouter trunk and a fuller crown of arching pinnate fronds than either parent gives alone. Both parents are South American, and the cross was first made by palm enthusiasts chasing a feather palm that would hold in the upper South.
A seldom-offered evergreen, Buxus balearica is the bold-leaved boxwood: an upright shrub or small tree related to the common boxwood, Buxus sempervirens, but with noticeably larger, glossier leaves. Less cold-hardy than the common box, the Balearic boxwood is a fine choice for warmer gardens, where the big evergreen leaves give a lush, polished presence.
A small boxwood with narrow, bright green leaves and an unusually showy spring bloom, this is apparently the true Buxus harlandii. The boxwoods commonly sold in the South as B. harlandii, including the variety 'Richard', are, according to Dr. Todd Lasseigne, another Asian species, Buxus bodinieri; the real harlandii is much less often seen.
A twisting, weeping take on the classic boxwood, Buxus sempervirens 'Unraveled' breaks the upright, clipped mold of the genus entirely. The branches arch and twist into a loose, cascading, almost sculptural form, dense with the familiar small evergreen leaves but carried on a frame that drapes rather than stands. A selection from the JC Raulston Arboretum, 'Unraveled' brings a wild, playful edge to a plant usually grown for rigid formality.
Few hardy shrubs put on a show like Caesalpinia gilliesii, the desert bird of paradise, whose summer flowers open clear yellow and send out a spray of long scarlet stamens like fireworks caught mid-burst. A legume from the dry country of Argentina and Uruguay, long naturalized across the American Southwest, the plant carries ferny, blue-green, mimosa-like foliage that sets off the flamboyant bloom. Botanists now place the species in the genus Erythrostemon, meaning red stamen, though gardeners still know the plant as Caesalpinia.
Callerya reticulata, the evergreen wisteria, is one of the most graceful vines for the Southern garden, and one of the most refined. Once known to botanists as Millettia reticulata and Wisteria reticulata, this evergreen climber is not a true wisteria, though the cascading habit and aristocratic bearing recall one. A vine for porches and pergolas, the evergreen wisteria prizes quiet bloom over brash spectacle, and carries both fragrance and folklore in the tendrils.
Callicarpa acuminata, the black beautyberry, is the Mexican cousin of the familiar American beautyberry, a deciduous shrub of arching branches that, in fall, lines the stems with clusters of small, shiny berries in glossy black rather than the usual purple. The dark fruit is a quiet, sophisticated turn on the beautyberry idea, set off by the green leaves and lingering into the cool months.
The genus name says it: Callicarpa, from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, beautiful fruit, a genus named for exactly what it does. Callicarpa americana, the American beautyberry, is the southeastern native that gives the genus a calling card. From late August into November, the plant sets dense clusters of small drupes in a luminous magenta-purple, a color that registers as almost unreal in the late-summer landscape, somewhere between fuchsia and amethyst, with no real precedent among native fruits. The berries gather in tight whorls around the stem at every leaf node, all the way down the arching branches, so that a mature shrub in October looks less like a shrub bearing fruit than a ribbon of purple glass beads strung along the branches.
Hardiness
Zones 7–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, immune support
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
Everyone who grows the native beautyberry knows the plant by the autumn display: those improbable whorls of magenta-purple fruit circling every stem like something a florist arranged and forgot to bill for. 'Welch's Pink' is that plant, in a color the species was not supposed to have.
'Profusion' is the beautyberry that finally made the genus behave. A Dutch selection out of Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii, a deciduous shrub from west and central China, this clone was chosen for one quality above all: fruit, in quantity, on a young plant, without needing a second shrub nearby to make it happen. Upright arching canes reach eight to ten feet, carrying bronze-purple new growth that shifts to pinkish purple in autumn. Small lilac-pink flowers open at the end of summer, unremarkable and much loved by bees. Then in October the point of the whole thing arrives: tight clusters of berries in a violet so saturated and so metallic that first-time visitors routinely assume the shrub has been sprayed. The berries hold on long after the leaves have gone, which is exactly when a garden needs them.
