Araucaria angustifolia is a living relic, one of the last of an ancient conifer family that shaded the dinosaurs across the supercontinent of Gondwana. The Paraná pine belongs to the Araucariaceae, kin to the Chilean monkey puzzle, the Norfolk Island pine, the Australian bunya, and the famously rediscovered Wollemi pine, a lineage once spread worldwide and now scattered mostly across the Southern Hemisphere. Despite the common name, the tree is no true pine at all, but something far older and stranger, holding stiff, sharp, dark green leaves on the branch for a decade or more.
Asimina obovata is the bigflower pawpaw, a Florida native that carries the largest, showiest blooms in a genus better known for its fruit. The pawpaws are the temperate outliers of the Annonaceae, the custard apple family whose tropical members include the cherimoya, soursop, and ylang-ylang, and Asimina alone among them ventures north into the sandy uplands of the American Southeast. The genus name descends from an early Native American word for the fruit, carried into English through the French asiminier, while obovata describes the egg-shaped leaves, broadest above the middle.
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.
Bejaria racemosa, the tarflower, is one of the odd and lovely surprises of the Florida scrub, a heath-family shrub that looks nothing like the rest of the clan. Where blueberries and azaleas carry small, fused, bell-shaped blooms, tarflower opens wide flowers of seven separate petals, white to soft pink and sweetly fragrant, held in loose summer racemes. The genus honors the eighteenth-century Spanish botanist Jose Bejar, and though older books spell the name Befaria, botanists have since settled on Bejaria.
This is the silvery blue-needled form of the China fir, and the color is the reason to choose it over the ordinary green. Needles are broad, flat, stiff, and sharply pointed, an inch or two long, arranged in spirals that read as flat sprays and holding a distinct glaucous blue that intensifies in good light. The frame is boldly pyramidal with tiered horizontal branching, reaching forty to sixty feet in cultivation here, considerably more in China. Old bark peels in long strips to reveal reddish brown beneath. Dead needles hang on inside the crown for a year or two, which some gardeners dislike and others regard as part of the character; either way, a China fir is never mistaken for anything else.
Daphniphyllum calycinum is a bold evergreen shrub that looks, at a glance, like a rhododendron, though the two are unrelated. Handsome, leathery, oval leaves cluster toward the branch tips, deep green above and glaucous, almost bluish-white beneath, giving the plant an exotic, architectural presence in the shade garden. Grown almost entirely for that striking foliage, this is a shrub for the collector rather than the crowd, and one virtually unknown in North American gardens.
Dendropanax trifidus is one of those quiet, aristocratic evergreens that rewards a second look and then a third. To the casual eye the plant reads as a glossy, tropical-looking small tree, something you would expect to sulk at the first frost; in truth this is a tough, warm-temperate native of the coastal forests of southern Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, hardy well into the Southeast and unbothered by heat, humidity, or a mild winter.
Few garden shrubs carry a resume like Dichroa febrifuga. In the ground this is a handsome, medium evergreen with lacecap heads of small blue flowers in late spring and, better still, clusters of berries in fall that ripen to an almost unreal iridescent, metallic blue, the kind of structural color usually reserved for beetles and tropical birds. A relatively recent introduction from China, the plant sits close enough to Hydrangea, in the family Hydrangeaceae, that the same trick applies: acidic soil deepens the flowers and fruit to true blue, while alkaline ground pushes them toward pink.
The genus name comes from the Greek dichroos, meaning "two-colored," and Dichroa versicolor presses the idea further: bloom color shifts with soil chemistry much the way a hydrangea does, swinging from deep cobalt to soft mauve depending on how much aluminum a plant can draw up. The species epithet versicolor only doubles down on the point, promising a shrub that refuses to settle on a single shade.
Exbucklandia populnea is a rare evergreen tree that fools nearly everyone who meets it. The large, glossy, leathery leaves, sometimes shallowly three-lobed and carried on long stalks, look for all the world like those of a tulip poplar, yet the tree belongs to the witch-hazel family, a kinship few would ever guess. Bold and architectural, with bronze-red new growth and curious upright stipules capping each shoot, this is a foliage tree of real presence.
Few plants carry a story like the Franklin tree. Collected from the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia by John and William Bartram in the 1760s and named by them for their friend Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia alatamaha was last seen growing wild around 1803 and has never been found in nature since. Every Franklinia alive today, in every garden and arboretum on earth, descends from the seed the Bartrams carried home to Philadelphia. To grow one is to hold a living piece of that lineage.
Glyptostrobus pensilis, the Chinese swamp cypress, is a living fossil and one of the rarest conifers on earth, the last surviving species of an ancient lineage that once ringed the Northern Hemisphere. A deciduous conifer of the cypress family, the swamp cypress is a near-twin of the American baldcypress, sharing the same feathery, soft green foliage, the same love of standing water, and even the same habit of throwing up woody knees from the roots in wet ground. In autumn the foliage turns a warm bronze-red before falling.
Kadsura japonica, the Japanese kadsura, is an evergreen twining vine of the star-anise family, Schisandraceae, a close relative of the medicinal magnolia-vine Schisandra, native to the woodlands of Japan, Korea, and southern China. 'Fukurin' is the variegated form, glossy dark green leaves edged in a clean cream-yellow margin that lights up a shaded wall or fence and holds through the year.
Kadsura longipedunculata is an evergreen twining vine of the star-anise family, Schisandraceae, native to the moist forests and shaded stream banks of southern and southwestern China. The leaves are narrow, glossy, dark green, and lightly toothed, carried on stems that climb without menace. The genus name comes from kazura, a Japanese word for a twining vine, and the species epithet means long-peduncled, for the slender stalks that let each flower hang clear of the foliage. Chinese gardeners and herbalists know the plant as nan wu wei zi, the southern five-flavor fruit, a nod to the close cousin Schisandra, whose berries are said to carry all five tastes at once. The French botanists Achille Finet and François Gagnepain gave the vine a formal name in 1905.
A refined and rarely encountered evergreen conifer from the mountains of southeastern China and Taiwan, Keteleeria davidiana is a tree of quiet distinction. Introduced to Western gardens in the nineteenth century, the species has stayed largely within botanical gardens and specialist collections, seldom offered in the nursery trade and still little known outside conifer circles. The genus name honors J. B. Keteleer, a French nurseryman of the era, while the epithet davidiana remembers Armand David, the missionary-naturalist who botanized widely in China.
A broadleaf evergreen with a story, this variegated tanbark oak came into the country from Japan through the late Dr. Fred Meyer of the United States National Arboretum, a botanist and tireless plant explorer, and was almost certainly first offered to American gardeners by Woodlanders. The draw is the foliage: dense, leathery, glossy leaves, each dark green blade split by an irregular central streak of gold and cream, so that a whole tree seems lit from within. Plant Delights later distributed the same selection under the name 'Starburst,' and both names point to this one bright-leaved plant.
Lithocarpus henryi, the Henry tanoak, is an evergreen cousin of the oaks that few gardeners have met. Native to the mountain forests of central China, the tree carries long, narrow, pointed leaves of glossy deep green and builds, in time, a dense, rounded evergreen crown of fifteen to twenty-five feet. Among a genus of mostly tender species, this one ranks as the hardiest, which is what makes the Henry tanoak worth seeking out for milder temperate gardens.
Lomatia myricoides is an Australian rarity that has quietly proven itself in the American Southeast, and that combination is the whole appeal. A member of the Proteaceae, the great Southern Hemisphere family of banksias, grevilleas, and the waratah, this evergreen shrub spreads wide and low, clothed in long, narrow, sharply toothed leaves, and carries sprays of creamy-white, spidery flowers in the heat of midsummer, sweetly fragrant at close range.
