For gardeners in a hurry. Fast-growing plants close the gap between a bare new garden and a full one, putting on real size in a season or two to give shade, screening, and structure while the slower, longer-lived plantings catch up.
Buddleia davidii 'Attraction' is a more compact butterfly bush than the usual run of the species, forming a rounded shrub of arching branches lined with gray-green leaves. From summer into fall, royal red, fragrant flowers gather in nodding panicles six to ten inches long, drawing butterflies and bees in profusion.
'Lochinch' is one of the most refined of the butterfly bushes, a cross of Buddleia davidii and the silvery Buddleia fallowiana that takes the best of both: dense, fragrant panicles of soft lavender-blue, each tiny flower lit by a small orange eye, over handsome gray-green, almost silver foliage. Compact and rounded, the shrub blooms all summer into fall on the new growth.
The genus name says it: Callicarpa, from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, beautiful fruit, a genus named for exactly what it does. Callicarpa americana, the American beautyberry, is the southeastern native that gives the genus a calling card. From late August into November, the plant sets dense clusters of small drupes in a luminous magenta-purple, a color that registers as almost unreal in the late-summer landscape, somewhere between fuchsia and amethyst, with no real precedent among native fruits. The berries gather in tight whorls around the stem at every leaf node, all the way down the arching branches, so that a mature shrub in October looks less like a shrub bearing fruit than a ribbon of purple glass beads strung along the branches.
Hardiness
Zones 7–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, immune support
The white-fruited form of the Asian beautyberry, Callicarpa dichotoma 'Albifructus' is a quiet pleasure of the late-summer border: instead of the usual magenta, the arching stems hang with luminous, ivory-white berries in elegant clusters, cool and refined where the purple kinds are bold. Native to eastern Asia, in Korea, China, and Japan, the white beautyberry is smaller and more graceful than the American species, and all the more striking for the restraint.
Callicarpa dichotoma 'Issai', the purple beautyberry, is a compact, cold-hardy selection grown for a heavy crop of glossy, violet-purple berries that ring the stems from late summer well into fall. Smaller and tidier than the American beautyberry, 'Issai' fruits young and freely, often setting berries on a single plant, and holds the color long after the leaves have gone.
Born of careful hands and watchful eyes at the JC Raulston Arboretum in North Carolina, Calycanthus × raulstonii 'Hartlage Wine' is a sweetshrub of uncommon grace. Richard Hartlage made the cross as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in 1991, pairing the Southern native Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus) with the refined Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis); the seedling first flowered in 1996, and the hybrid name honors J.C. Raulston, the arboretum's late director.
Among ornamental grasses, Chasmanthium latifolium is the rare one that thrives in shade. River oats, also called northern sea oats and inland sea oats, is a clumping, rhizomatous perennial grass of the eastern and central United States, found in the wild along wooded creek banks, river bottoms, and shaded slopes from Pennsylvania south to Florida and west toward the prairies. The broad, bamboo-like blades are wider than most grasses can claim, and the plant carries them in a loose, arching mound that takes deep shade without sulking.
The genus name Dietes comes from the Greek for "having two relatives," a botanist's nod to the plant's kinship with both Iris and Moraea, near neighbors in the iris family. The species epithet bicolor means simply two-colored, for the soft yellow petals brushed with a dark thumbprint at the base. Between the two words, the whole plant is named for doubleness: two kin, two colors.
Dryopteris ludoviciana, the southern shield fern, is a bold, glossy evergreen native to the wet woodlands of the American South. The species epithet ludoviciana means "of Louisiana," a nod to the swampy bottomlands, blackwater hammocks, and shaded seeps where the fern grows wild, from Florida west to Texas and north through the Carolinas.
Dryopteris ×remota, the remote wood fern or scaly buckler fern, is one of those quiet accidents of nature that turns out better than anything a breeder set out to make. The fern is a naturally occurring hybrid between the scaly male fern, Dryopteris affinis, of western Europe and the British Isles, and the broad buckler fern, Dryopteris expansa, of cooler northern woods. From the affinis parent the hybrid took shaggy stalks thickly clothed in golden-brown scales; from expansa, the fine, lacy cut of the frond. The epithet remota, meaning scattered or spaced apart, points to the way the lowest segments stand a little distant from one another along the frond, a subtle tell that separates this fern from the crowd of look-alike wood ferns.
Morella pumila is the dwarf waxmyrtle, a low, native evergreen that keeps everything gardeners love about the common wax myrtle, aromatic foliage, waxy berries, and a tough constitution, and shrinks it all to knee height. Native to the frequently burned pinelands of the southern United States, the plant is an adaptation to that fiery world, staying small and spreading slowly into dense patches and colonies by underground runners.
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.
Oleander, Nerium oleander, is the great sun-loving evergreen of the Mediterranean, grown since antiquity for a long summer of bloom, with dark green, leathery, lance-shaped leaves in whorls of three along long, sparingly branched stems. 'Hardy Pink' is one of the cold-tougher selections, carrying showy, lightly fragrant clusters of clear rose-pink flowers from late spring well into fall.
For a plant this common, the Christmas fern carries an oddly specific origin for the name. The fern was christened, the story goes, by one John Robinson, a botany professor at the Peabody Academy in Salem, Massachusetts, sometime in the late 1800s, and set down for posterity in a 1923 volume with the irreproachable title The Fern-Lover's Companion. Robinson's reasoning was seasonal. When the other ferns of the eastern woods go brown and crisp at the first hard frost, Polystichum acrostichoides holds green straight through December, which made the plant the fern people cut for wreaths and mantels at Christmas. There is a second theory, quieter and harder to settle, that the name comes from the leaflets themselves: look closely and each pinna carries a small lobe at its base, an ear or a thumb, that gives the leaflet the outline of a Christmas stocking. Both camps are probably right.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Plant type
Fern
Traditional use
pain relief, respiratory support, digestive health
If any native perennial could be said to hum, the honor would go to Pycnanthemum muticum. From mid to late summer the blunt mountain mint gathers a shimmer of broad, silver-frosted bracts at the top of every stem, and within them open dense heads of tiny pink-to-white flowers that draw an almost comic density of life: bees of every kind, wasps, butterflies, skippers, moths, and flies working the nectar from dawn to dusk. In a three-year Penn State study that monitored eighty-six species, no plant drew a greater number and diversity of pollinators.
Smooth sumac is a bold, colony-forming native shrub of the eastern and central United States, in time reaching the scale of a small tree, and one of the finest plants going for a hot, dry, sunny site where little else will thrive. The long, pinnately compound leaves give an almost tropical texture through summer, and the plant spreads by root suckers into broad, picturesque colonies, or can be held to a single tree-like specimen where the suckers are controlled.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun
Height
9–15 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Staghorn sumac is a bold native shrub or small tree of the northeastern United States and Canada, growing fifteen to thirty feet on stout, forking stems clothed in fine velvety hairs, the texture and antler-like branching that give the plant the name. The big, pinnate leaves are bright green through summer and turn a spectacular blend of yellow, orange, and red in fall, one of the great autumn shrubs of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–30 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Salvia leucantha, the Mexican bush sage, is one of the great fall salvias, grown for arching wands of flower that seem spun from felt. Long spikes rise above the foliage in late summer and fall, densely packed with velvety purple calyces from which small white corollas emerge, a soft two-tone effect that catches low autumn light and holds for weeks. Few plants close the gardening year with such generous, easy color.
Thelypteris acuminata is a handsome evergreen fern from the woodlands of Japan and eastern Asia, grown for glossy green fronds that arch softly and hold their color through the year. Unlike the many deciduous ferns that vanish in winter, this species keeps a steady, structural presence in the shaded garden, one of the reasons the plant is prized where an evergreen fern is wanted.
The southern shield fern carries a longer pedigree than most ferns in cultivation. The type specimen was collected by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland near Cumanacoa, in the cloud-shrouded country around Caripe in northeastern Venezuela, during their five-year expedition through the equinoctial Americas. Decades later the German botanist Carl Sigismund Kunth, Humboldt's assistant in Paris and the man who would spend years describing the ten thousand and more specimens the explorers shipped home, became the namesake when Nicaise Auguste Desvaux formally described the species in 1827 as Nephrodium kunthii. C.V. Morton moved the fern into Thelypteris in 1967, and recent molecular work (Fawcett and Smith, 2021) has shifted the name again into Pelazoneuron, though the older binomial remains the one in common horticultural use.
