Plants that ask for water while they root, then fend for themselves. Chosen for gardens on sand, slope, or full baking sun, these are the tough, sun-loving plants that flower hardest in the heat and shrug off a dry August once established.
Carex flaccosperma, the blue wood sedge, is a clump-forming native of the Southeastern woodlands grown for cool, glaucous, blue to blue-green foliage. The blades are wide for a sedge, to half an inch, faintly quilted along the veins, and they catch the light with a soft powdery sheen that lifts a shaded planting where most greens recede.
Clinopodium georgianum is a low, aromatic shrublet of the mint family, prized for highly scented foliage and clouds of pinkish-lavender flowers in late summer and fall, when much of the garden is winding down. Georgia savory makes a fine edging or front-of-border plant for sunny or lightly shaded spots with good drainage, and unlike most of the tribe, this southern native will grow in heavier soils as well as sand.
Muhlenbergia dumosa, bamboo muhly, is a desert-born grass with the grace of bamboo, drifting like cloud shadow across the canyon floor. From the arid uplands and rocky washes of northern Mexico and southern Arizona, where sun-scorched cliffs and canyon walls shaped the character of the species, bamboo muhly evolved to thrive on dry air and lean soils, and yet carries the fluid elegance of true bamboo, swaying at the faintest breeze.
Myrcianthes fragrans is a member of the myrtle family native to the hammocks and coastal scrub of Florida and the Caribbean, the same botanical neighborhood as guava and allspice, which says something about the family character and the quality of the fragrance involved. Crush a leaf and the scent is immediate and specific: nutmeg with a citrus edge, clean and resinous in a way that makes the plant worth encountering even out of flower. The tiny, deep green leaves hold the aromatic oils responsible, and keep that quality year-round.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
A graceful native onion, Allium cernuum, the nodding onion, lifts loose clusters of pink to lavender, bell-shaped flowers that bend over in a soft arc at the top of slender stems, swaying through mid and late summer above tufts of grassy, blue-green foliage. The nodding habit gives the plant a particular charm, and the flowers draw native bees, butterflies, and other pollinators in good numbers.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
12–18 in.
Spread
6–8 in.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, immune support
Flame acanthus, better known as hummingbird bush, is a tough, airy deciduous shrub for hot, dry places, hung from late spring until frost with slender orange to red tubular flowers that ruby-throated hummingbirds cannot resist. Small, pointed leaves give a light, open texture, and the long bloom season makes Anisacanthus wrightii one of the best hummingbird plants for the southern garden.
A pumpkin-orange selection of the classic flame acanthus, Anisacanthus wrightii 'Pumpkin' trades the usual scarlet for warm, glowing orange, lighting the late-season garden with the same slender, tubular, hummingbird flowers. The clone was discovered at the San Antonio Botanic Garden and is generally taken to be the selection known as 'Pumpkin'.
Baptisia alba, white wild indigo, is a striking native perennial of tall spires of white, pea-like flowers over deep blue-green foliage. Native to the eastern and central United States, the species carries a rich history as a dye plant, used by Native American peoples and early settlers as a substitute for true indigo, and the genus name, from the Greek bapto, to dip, records that role.
Calycanthus floridus 'Athens', also circulated under the name 'Katherine', is a yellow-flowered selection of the Eastern sweetshrub, a deciduous native of the Southeastern woodlands long grown for fragrance, adaptability, and strange, many-tepaled flowers. Where the wild plant blooms a deep maroon, 'Athens' opens soft, buttery yellow, an unexpected and elegant turn on a familiar shrub.
The conradinas are dense, aromatic, low shrubs of the mint family, dressed in small, usually needle-like green or gray leaves and hung with little pale purple flowers. Six or seven species grow wild in the southern United States, most of them in Florida on sand or very sandy soil, and all but this one (and one possibly new species) are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Conradina canescens is the common, widespread member of the clan, a somewhat variable plant of the Gulf Coast dunes of northwest Florida and adjacent Alabama.
Once thought lost to time and development, Cyrilla arida, known as Scrub Titi, is a botanical rarity with a story as striking as the summer bloom. The famed botanist J.K. Small first described this shrub in the early twentieth century from the desert-like scrub of central Florida. For decades the identity of Scrub Titi was debated and any wild presence uncertain, until a dedicated search led to rediscovery by Kenneth Wurdack and the Woodlanders team in Highlands County, Florida. That tiny remnant population may now be gone, and Cyrilla arida may no longer exist in the wild, which makes every plant in cultivation all the more precious.
A relic of the old Southern wilds, Erythrina herbacea, the coral bean, is a plant that commands attention, graceful yet defiant, wild yet refined. A legume native across the coastal Southeast, the coral bean shifts habit with the winter: in frost-free zones the plant grows as a woody shrub, branching boldly above the ground, while farther north the top dies down with the first hard freeze, only to rise again from a thick, gnarled rootstock when the heat returns, an emblem of Southern resilience.
Manfreda maculosa carries the rugged beauty of the American Southwest into the garden. Known by a string of evocative names, Texas tuberose, spice lily, and rattlesnake agave, this striking plant hails from the arid country of Texas and northern Mexico, where the spotted leaves and tall, aromatic flower stalks have caught the eye of gardeners and naturalists for generations.
Morella pumila 'Willow Leaf' is a distinctive, fine-leaved form of the native dwarf waxmyrtle, selected for narrow, elongated, willow-like leaves that give the low shrub an unusually elegant, airy texture rarely seen in the species. Like the wild plant, this is a low, spreading, colony-forming evergreen of the fire-adapted pinelands of the southeastern United States, once listed as Myrica pusilla and now placed in the genus Morella.
Ptelea trifoliata, the hop tree or wafer ash, is a unique and underappreciated native, a small, bushy deciduous tree of eastern and central North America. Highly adaptable, the plant takes dry, rocky ground as readily as moist, well-drained sites, which makes the hop tree a fine choice for naturalized landscapes, pollinator gardens, and woodland edges.
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
A native tree that bites back, and can numb a toothache. Zanthoxylum clava-herculis, the toothache tree or Hercules' club, is a small to medium deciduous tree of the citrus family, native along the coastal Southeast from Virginia to Florida and Texas. The genus name Zanthoxylum means yellow wood, and the species clava-herculis, the club of Hercules, names the stout, spiny, club-shaped trunk that is the tree's signature.
