The plants you grow for your grandchildren. Canopy trees are the garden's largest and longest-lived residents, the shade-throwers and skyline-makers that set the scale of everything planted beneath them.
The pawpaw is a small, tropical-looking deciduous tree with large, drooping leaves and the largest edible fruit native to this country. In mid to late summer the green, mango-shaped fruit softens to a fragrant custard, banana and mango in one, around rows of big dark seeds, relished by people and raccoons alike. The crushed leaves carry a distinctive odor, and the whole tree reads more like the tropics than a temperate woodland.
This is a tree you harvest from a boat. Crataegus opaca, the western mayhaw, grows wild in the flooded bottoms of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the cypress sloughs and pond margins of east Texas, Louisiana, and the Deep South, and when their fruit ripens in late spring it drops straight into the water and floats. For generations Southern families went out in May with boats, nets, and scoops to gather the bobbing red haws off the surface, a fast three weeks of work that turned into a year's worth of jelly. The name says as much: mayhaw, for the month, and haw, the old word for hawthorn.
Magnolia virginiana, the sweetbay magnolia, has long been a tree of distinction in the American landscape, ranging from the cool wetlands of Massachusetts to the Gulf Coast. Across that span the species wears two very different guises. In the northern states the sweetbay is a smaller, often shrubby tree that drops its leaves in winter; in the Deep South the species reaches fullest expression as Magnolia virginiana var. australis, the evergreen southern sweetbay, a large and enduring tree of great grace.
Black gum is one of the longest-lived hardwoods in eastern North America; individual trees have been aged past six hundred and fifty years, standing quietly in swamp margins and rocky uplands while everything human around them came and went. The names alone are a small history lesson. Nyssa was a water nymph of Greek myth, sylvatica means of the woods, so the botanical name reads as water nymph of the forest; tupelo comes from the Creek ito and opilwa, tree and swamp; and the old northern name pepperidge is the one a Connecticut baker borrowed for her farm and her bread company. Curiously, no part of the tree is gummy at all. What black gum does own is the autumn. They are among the first trees to turn and among the fiercest, the glossy summer leaves igniting into scarlet, orange, and deep wine-purple weeks before the rest of the woods has given the season a thought, an early flare that signals birds to the ripening blue fruit. The wood is so cross-grained it is nearly impossible to split, which sent it into tool handles, chopping bowls, and, where trunks went hollow with age, into bee gums, the log hives that made gum a synonym for beehive across Appalachia. Black gum is notoriously hard to move at any size, which is exactly why you so rarely see a big one for sale, and exactly why you should start one small, now, and let them outlive you.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
30–40 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support, reproductive health
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.
Korean mountain ash is the unusual member of the clan, a deciduous tree from Korea, recently moved by botanists from Sorbus into the genus Alniaria, with simple, finely toothed, alder-like leaves rather than the compound leaves of the familiar mountain ashes. White flower clusters open in May, and the fall foliage turns warm shades of orange and red.
A hybrid strawberry tree, Arbutus x andrachnoides crosses the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, with the Grecian strawberry tree, A. andrachne, and takes the best of both: white, bell-shaped flowers and pink, strawberry-like fruit on a small evergreen tree, over dark green leaves an inch and a half to four inches long. The real prize comes with age, when the bark peels away to a smooth, rich red-brown that rivals any madrone.
Few native trees announce spring like Cercis canadensis, the eastern redbud, whose bare branches flush rosy pink and magenta weeks before the dogwoods open. The small pea-like flowers cluster not just along the twigs but straight from the older branches and even the trunk, a charming trick called cauliflory, and give way to broad, heart-shaped leaves. A small, graceful understory tree of eastern and central North America, redbud belongs in the legume family, kin to peas and beans.
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.
American yellowwood is one of the loveliest and least common of our native trees, a broad, round-headed deciduous tree grown for three good seasons of interest. In late spring, usually May, long pendulous panicles of white, pea-like flowers hang from the branch tips, sweetly fragrant and wisteria-like, a spectacle in the years the tree chooses to flower heavily. Summer brings clean, bright-then-deep green compound foliage, and autumn a dependable, clear golden yellow that is among the best fall color of any hardwood. The smooth gray bark, beech-like, holds the winter garden.
There is a version of the flowering dogwood almost nobody has met. Cornus florida 'Suwanee Squat' was found in Suwannee County, Florida, by Bob Simons, a forest ecologist who spent half a century protecting the wild hardwood country of north Florida. As a young man in the early 1970s he walked a mixed-hardwood hammock outside Gainesville, decided the place was worth saving, and talked ten landowners and the state into making it San Felasco Hammock; that became the pattern of his life. A man who knew that kind of forest the way most of us know our own street is exactly the sort to notice a dogwood doing something a dogwood is not supposed to do. Woodlanders introduced his low, sprawling oddity to cultivation, and the plant has stayed scarce ever since, the kind of tree you mostly hear about secondhand from someone who saw one and never got over it.
Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood, is the beloved understory tree of the eastern North American woods, widely planted for the great show of white spring bracts (the true flowers are the small green knot at the center), and, in selections like this one, pink. A deciduous woodland tree that grows in moist, well-drained soil in sun or high, dappled shade, the dogwood rewards careful planting: set the root flare high, and never plant too deep.
This elegant small tree carries a graceful, vase-shaped habit that rounds out with age. Blooming two to three weeks after Cornus florida, the kousa dogwood opens striking, pointed flower bracts in late spring to early summer, extending the dogwood season. The bracts surround clusters of tiny true flowers in a star-like display that sets this dogwood apart.
This Chinese dogwood is a spreading, small to medium deciduous tree with clean foliage and showy white-bracted flowers. Unlike the native American flowering dogwood, the bracts are sharply pointed. The tree flowers about a month later than Cornus florida, and is apparently immune or resistant to some of the disease problems that trouble Cornus florida in certain areas. A fine ornamental for an open, semi-shady lawn or border.
Crataegus harbisonii is a small, thorny, deciduous hawthorn with unusually large leaves for the genus, white spring flowers, and red fall fruit. Behind that modest description stands one of the rarest trees in North America: Harbison's hawthorn was perhaps once fairly common around central Tennessee, but is now all but extinct in the wild.
The parsley haw, Crataegus marshallii, is a distinctive and graceful small native tree, named for the shiny, deeply dissected, parsley-like leaves that set the whole genus apart at a glance. White flowers centered with rosy-red stamens open in spring, followed by bright red fruit that lingers into fall.
Diospyros texana, the Texas persimmon, is a small, tough native tree grown above all for the bark, which peels away in thin flakes to reveal a smooth, mottled patchwork of white, gray, and pink beneath. Intricately and crookedly branched, this is a sculptural little tree, as handsome bare in winter as it is in leaf. A creature of the Texas hill country and northern Mexico, the Texas persimmon shrugs off heat, drought, and lean limestone soil that would defeat softer plants.
The botanical name reads like a compliment: Diospyros joins the Greek dios, divine, to pyros, grain, so the genus translates roughly as "fruit of the gods," a lofty title for a tree that drops sweet, homely orange fruit onto the forest floor each autumn. The common name travels the other direction, plain and American, from the Powhatan word putchamin for a dried fruit, a reminder that Native peoples were drying persimmons into cakes long before the botanists arrived.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
55–60 ft.
Spread
30–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Anacua, Ehretia anacua, is one of the signature small trees of the south Texas brush country and the lower Rio Grande, a member of the borage family that goes by a small crowd of names. The rough, sandpapery upper surface of the leaves earns the tag sandpaper tree, while old-timers along the border call the tree anacua or, corrupted through generations, knockaway. Evergreen to semi-evergreen depending on the winter, the anacua holds dark green, leathery leaves that feel like fine grit under a thumb.
