Cedrus deodara, the deodar cedar, is a true cedar, not to be confused with the many junipers and other conifers that borrow the name. A splendid, broad-spreading large conifer, the deodar carries blue-green needles that are the longest of any true cedar, held in soft tufts along gracefully drooping branchlets and a nodding leader that give the tree a distinctive weeping elegance even at a young age.
Buttonbush is a rounded, deciduous native shrub, easily trained as a small multi-stemmed tree, grown for the curious globe-shaped flowers that give the plant its name. From early summer into fall, creamy-white pincushion balls about an inch across stud the branches, each a sphere of tiny tubular flowers with projecting styles that lend a fireworks effect, intensely fragrant and alive with bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Hardiness
Zones 5–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, general wellness, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications
Cephalotaxus harringtonia 'Fastigiata' is the columnar Japanese plum yew, a needle-leaf evergreen of distinctive upright form, the dark green, glossy needles arranged in dense whorls around stiffly erect branches like a green bottlebrush held vertical. An ancient Japanese and Korean clone, the plant occasionally throws a shoot of the flat, two-ranked foliage typical of the wild species, a quiet reminder of the parent.
Cephalotaxus harringtonia 'Prostrata' is the spreading Japanese plum yew, a low, wide-growing evergreen prized for lush, dark green, needle-like foliage and an easy way with shade. Where the species and its columnar forms stand upright, 'Prostrata' lays out horizontally, three or four feet high and twice as wide, layering into a handsome evergreen groundcover or low border.
Ceratostigma willmottianum, the Chinese plumbago, is a small deciduous subshrub grown for one of the truest blues in the garden. From midsummer into autumn the wiry, bristly-leaved stems carry clusters of intense cobalt-blue flowers, each a slim reddish-purple tube opening to five pale-blue lobes, and as the season cools the foliage turns a rich red and bronze, so that blue flower and crimson leaf often share the plant at once.
Cercis yunnanensis, the Yunnan redbud, is an upright, vase-shaped deciduous tree that opens the spring with an abundance of magenta-pink, pea-like flowers, borne in the redbud fashion straight along the bare branches and older wood before the leaves appear. The heart-shaped leaves that follow are the tree's quieter distinction: glossier and more refined than those of most redbuds, giving a polished, clean-textured canopy through summer.
Cestrum elegans var. smithii is the soft, blush-rose form of the elegant cestrum, a fast, arching shrub that carries dense terminal clusters of slender tubular flowers in a warm pink, mildly fragrant in the evening and a steady draw for hummingbirds. Where the species runs to hot red-purple, this variety keeps things gentler, blooming from late spring well into fall, and year-round under glass.
Few plants announce themselves the way Cestrum nocturnum does, and never by daylight. Through the afternoon the shrub keeps to a quiet, almost ordinary green, the slender branches arching and half-climbing, the small tubular flowers furled and unremarkable. Then dusk arrives, the cream-green trumpets open, and the night-blooming jasmine releases a perfume so far-reaching that it carries across a whole garden on still, warm air.
Chamaecyparis obtusa 'Filicoides', the fernspray hinoki cypress, is grown for one quality above all: foliage held in flattened, fern-like sprays that gather along the branches in dense, layered clusters and cascade in soft, pendulous fans. The effect is unmistakably oriental, deep green the year round, and unlike anything else in the conifer border.
A silvery, soft-textured juvenile-foliage form with an unusual and well-documented history. 'Shiva' was originally presumed to be Chamaecyparis thyoides, the Atlantic white cedar, but now appears to be a form of Chamaecyparis pisifera, the sawara cypress of Japan. The plant was found as a seedling on Cape Cod by Rekha Morris of Pendleton, South Carolina, and introduced by Clarence Towe of Walhalla, South Carolina. By all signs this curious form will never become a large tree.
Leatherleaf is the quiet constant of the northern bog. Chamaedaphne calyculata, the only species in the genus, is a low, thicket-forming evergreen of the heath family that ranges right around the cold northern world, from the peatlands of North America east to the bogs of Finland and Japan, and southward in this country to the pocosins and acid bogs of the coastal plain, as far as South Carolina. Across that vast range, leatherleaf forms the dense, spreading colonies that hold a bog together and shelter the wildlife within.
Among ornamental grasses, Chasmanthium latifolium is the rare one that thrives in shade. River oats, also called northern sea oats and inland sea oats, is a clumping, rhizomatous perennial grass of the eastern and central United States, found in the wild along wooded creek banks, river bottoms, and shaded slopes from Pennsylvania south to Florida and west toward the prairies. The broad, bamboo-like blades are wider than most grasses can claim, and the plant carries them in a loose, arching mound that takes deep shade without sulking.
The turtlehead is named twice over for things that go quiet. The genus Chelone is the Greek word for tortoise, after a nymph who mocked the marriage of Zeus and Hera and was turned, for her insolence, into a creature that carries her house and holds her tongue; one look at the flower, a hinged, swollen, pink-and-gaping thing that seems about to either speak or bite, and you see why the name stuck. The species honors John Lyon, the Scottish plant hunter who worked the southern Appalachians in the footsteps of Bartram and Michaux. Lyon collected this turtlehead somewhere in the mountains around 1812 without recording quite where, noting only in his catalog that here was a new species, and a beautiful one; his friend Frederick Pursh later pinned Lyon's name to the plant. Lyon did not have long to enjoy the honor, dying in 1814 in the same southern mountains that had made his name. The plant has fared better. Chelone lyonii grows wild along streambanks and seeps in the high southern Appalachians, and 'Hot Lips' is the selection that turned the color up, deeper rose-pink flowers over foliage that emerges with a bronze cast. The flowers arrive in late summer and run into fall, which is the real gift, holding color in the moist and shaded corners just as the rest of the garden tires. Only a bumblebee is strong enough to force the blooms open, so a planting in flower comes with a low percussion of bees muscling in and backing out. Give them wet feet and a little shade and there is very little that does a damp, difficult spot this gracefully, or this late.
In the dead of winter, when the garden has given up on color and scent alike, Chimonanthus praecox quietly does the impossible. On bare, leafless branches, often in January and February, the wintersweet opens small, waxy, cupped stars of translucent pale yellow, each flushed at the heart with maroon, and from them pours a fragrance so rich and far-carrying that a single sprig will perfume a room. The Chinese name, la mei, the wax plum, catches the look of the petals exactly.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
12–15 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, general wellness, mental & emotional well-being
For a week or two in late spring, the Chinese fringetree disappears under snow. Chionanthus retusus var. serrulatus is a deciduous small tree of East Asia, native to China, Korea, and Japan, and the great show is the flowering: dense, lacy, fringed panicles of pure white, each petal narrow and strap-like, smothering the canopy so thickly that the foliage all but vanishes. The genus name says as much, from the Greek chion, snow, and anthos, flower.
The native fringetree is one of the great small trees of the southern spring. Chionanthus virginicus, a deciduous large shrub or small tree, often multi-stemmed, hangs the whole canopy with fleecy, drooping panicles of narrow white petals in spring, soft as torn paper and lightly fragrant, a look that earned the old country names old man's beard and grancy graybeard. On female plants the flowers give way to clusters of raisin-sized, deep blue-purple fruits that birds take quickly.
Choisya is a small genus of aromatic evergreen shrubs from the southwestern United States and Mexico, kin to citrus in the rue family, and Choisya 'Aztec Pearl' is the garden world's favorite of the tribe. The hybrid, a cross between Choisya arizonica and Choisya ternata, was raised by Peter Moore at Longstock Park Nursery in England, and the selection has proved hardier, more heat tolerant, and altogether easier in the garden than either parent.
A rare evergreen tree from southern China, seldom seen in cultivation, Cinnamomum wilsonii belongs to the cinnamon and camphor clan, and the kinship shows in the glossy, leathery, dark green leaves, four to five inches long and marked with three bold veins that run nearly to the tip. Crushed or bruised, the foliage and bark give off the warm, spicy fragrance the genus is loved for. The Chinese name, chuan gui, places the tree in Sichuan and the mountains of the south, where the tree grows large and the aromatic bark has long been valued.
The rockroses bloom as if for a single day, and in a sense they do. Each papery flower of Cistus x purpureus lasts only from morning to evening before dropping, yet through late spring the shrub opens fresh bloom after fresh bloom, so the whole plant seems perpetually covered. The flowers are the draw: two to three inches wide, crushed-silk petals of pinky purple, each stamped at the base with a deep maroon blotch, a marking that earned the old garden name orchidspot rockrose. Rockroses are not roses, and are not related; the resemblance is only in the open, five-petalled face.
Sourced originally from the noted citrus enthusiast Tom McClendon, Citrumelo 'Dallas' is a cold-hardy hybrid between the rugged trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, and a grapefruit. From that unlikely pairing comes a vigorous small tree that carries the trifoliate's toughness and a good measure of grapefruit character in the fruit.
