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.
A small-to-medium evergreen oak unlike anything in the North American flora. Quercus salicina belongs to section Cyclobalanopsis of the oak genus, the ring-cupped oaks, an entirely Asian group of evergreen oaks distinguished from every American oak by the concentric rings on the acorn cup, rather than the overlapping scales of the red and white oak groups. Some taxonomists treat Cyclobalanopsis as a genus of its own. To grow this oak in a Southeastern garden is to bring in a fundamentally different evolutionary lineage, one that has been evolving in isolation in the temperate forests of Japan and Korea for tens of millions of years, in parallel with the separate American radiation. The result reads as recognizably Quercus in habit and presence, yet is architecturally distinct in nearly every detail.
Nuttall oak is named for Thomas Nuttall, the restless English-American naturalist who botanized the young United States more thoroughly than almost anyone of his generation. Long known as Quercus nuttallii, the tree now carries the name Quercus texana in most botanical usage, a change that has caused no end of confusion, since the name once belonged to a different oak. Whatever the label, this is a large deciduous red oak of the Southern bottomlands, at home in the floodplain forests of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley.
Few trees carry the weight of the South the way the live oak does. Quercus virginiana is the massive, broad-spreading, long-lived evergreen oak of the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas, the tree of avenues and old plantations, of moss-hung branches reaching low and wide over generations of the same ground. Given room and time, a live oak grows far wider than tall, the great limbs sweeping out and often down to rest on the earth, and the whole tree becomes a piece of living architecture. Georgia named the live oak the state tree, and ancient specimens are landmarks across the Deep South.
The Southern live oak needs no introduction in the coastal South, where the great, spreading, moss-draped evergreens are as much a part of the landscape as the light. Quercus virginiana 'Bok Tower' begins from that familiar species but carries an unusual story and, perhaps, an unusual future.
Few native trees announce themselves as cheerfully as Sassafras albidum, whose leaves come in three shapes on the same branch: an unlobed oval, a two-lobed mitten, and a three-lobed silhouette like a splayed hand. A member of the laurel family, Lauraceae, and kin to bay, cinnamon, and spicebush, sassafras carries aromatic oils in every part, so that a snapped twig or crushed leaf releases a warm, root-beer sweetness. The common name traces back through Spanish to the colonial Southeast, where the tree was among the first American plants shipped to Europe as a marketable medicine.
If you already grow a camellia, a stewartia, or a Franklinia, you know most of what a Schima is trying to be. The genus sits in the tea family, evergreen where the American members are deciduous, and carries the family flower in the purest form the family manages: five white petals cupped around a dense boss of gold stamens, two inches or so across, fragrant, and scattered through the crown in summer rather than delivered all at once. Schima remotiserrata is a southeast Chinese species, native to Fujian, Guangdong, eastern Guangxi, southern Hunan, and Jiangxi, and almost unknown in American gardens; the epithet refers to the leaf margin, toothed at intervals rather than continuously, which is the field character that separates this species from a shelf full of near relatives.
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.
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.
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.
American basswood is one of the great shade and honey trees of eastern North America, a fast, stately deciduous tree with large, heart-shaped, softly toothed leaves and a broad, rounded, generous crown. Tilia americana has been cherished by Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and naturalists alike, and goes by a string of names: linden, bee tree, and lime, though the tree is no relation to the citrus lime. In late spring and early summer, hanging clusters of pale yellow, sweetly fragrant flowers open and hum with bees.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
20–30 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, respiratory support, digestive health
One of the finest shade trees for a hard place. Zelkova serrata, the Japanese zelkova, is a deciduous tree of the elm family, native to Japan, Korea, and eastern China, long valued as the sacred keyaki of Japanese temples and a prized timber and bonsai subject. In the West the tree has become a leading street and lawn tree, in no small part as a graceful, disease-resistant stand-in for the American elms lost to Dutch elm disease.
