Brush past a Conradina and the air answers back, resinous and clean, somewhere between rosemary and pine. The false rosemaries are low, aromatic shrubs of the mint family, dressed in fine needle-like leaves and hung in spring with small tubular flowers of lavender, pink, or white, each lower lip freckled with a deeper purple. The genus honors Solomon White Conrad, a Philadelphia botanist, and nearly all seven species grow wild on the deep, pine-fringed sands of the Southeast.

Several are rarer than almost anything in American horticulture. Conradina glabra, Conradina etonia, and Conradina grandiflora are federally endangered, and Conradina verticillata is listed as threatened, their sandhill habitat whittled away by development. Growing a nursery-propagated plant is a quiet way to keep a vanishing species in cultivation, and the bees are glad of the flowers besides.