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.
Two things the common names get wrong: it is not Chinese, and it is not a maple. Abutilon pictum comes from the warm river country of southern Brazil and its neighbors, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the maple lives only in the leaves, which are lobed and toothed enough to have fooled people into "flowering maple." It belongs instead to the mallow family, in good company with hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and it carries that resemblance in every five-petaled bloom.
Call it a flowering maple if you like, but there is not a drop of maple in it. Abutilon pictum belongs to the mallow family, alongside hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and only the lobed, maple-shaped leaves account for the nickname. What the leaves of 'Souvenir de Bonn' actually do is carry a wide, irregular margin of cream around their green, a variegation bold enough to earn the plant its place on looks alone. The flowers settle the matter. All season they dangle from the branches like small paper lanterns, apricot to salmon, each bell veined through with crimson, swinging on thin stalks where the hummingbirds find them. 'Souvenir de Bonn' is among the oldest abutilons still in gardens, a parlor plant out of the conservatory age, when a variegated flowering maple was the sort of thing one kept in a bright room through winter and carried out to the terrace each summer. The species hails from Brazil; the cultivar name is a keepsake of Bonn, a souvenir that outlasted whoever first carried it home. They are tender, frost being their one real enemy, and in our climate they may sail through a mild winter outdoors or die to the ground and return from the root. Either way they earn their keep, blooming spring to frost and beyond, asking only for sun, rich soil, and water enough to keep the show going. Set them where you pass close, on a patio or against a warm wall, where the lanterns can be read at eye level.
Madeira vine is a fast, twining, deciduous climber with fleshy, heart-shaped leaves and sprays of tiny, fragrant cream-white flowers in late summer and fall. Anredera cordifolia climbs by winding tuberous stems, and a warty crop of aerial tubers along the stems, some as large as a small potato, is the surest mark of the plant and a ready means of increase.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–20 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
topical applications, reproductive health, general wellness
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
True cardamom, Elettaria cardamomum, is a lush, aromatic member of the ginger family and the source of green cardamom, the ancient and costly spice traded for millennia along the Silk Road and across the Indian Ocean. Native to the humid, evergreen hill forests of southern India and Sri Lanka, the plant grows in the dappled shade of the understory, in deep, fertile, always-moist soil. Ranked historically among the most valuable spices in the world, cardamom carries a history as rich as the flavor.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
3–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
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
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
Acca sellowiana, the pineapple guava, is that rare plant that is handsome enough for the border and generous enough for the kitchen. It came to botanical notice through the German naturalist Friedrich Sellow, who collected it in southern Brazil in 1819, and it carries his name still; for years it was known, and is often still sold, as Feijoa sellowiana. Its true home is the subtropical highlands of southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, and from there it has traveled to warm gardens the world over.
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
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
This is the wild strawberry of eastern North America, Fragaria virginiana, the modest little groundcover that carpets sunny woodland edges, old fields, and roadside banks across the continent. Trifoliate, serrated leaves rise in low tufts, and slender runners reach out to root new plantlets at their tips, so that a single crown becomes a colony in a season or two.
Firebush earns the name honestly. From late spring until the first frost, the arching branch tips carry tight clusters of slender tubular flowers in hot orange-red, each one a narrow torch held out for the hummingbirds and butterflies that work the plant from morning to dusk. The foliage plays along: new leaves and stems flush bronze to burgundy, the veins stained red, so that even between flushes of bloom the whole shrub reads warm. Few plants pull in as much winged traffic through the heat of a southern summer.
Yaupon is the small-leaved evergreen holly of the southeastern coastal plain, native from Virginia to Texas and a member of the holly family, Aquifoliaceae. Adaptable almost to a fault, salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and content in sun or shade, the species takes shearing as neatly as boxwood and has served Southern gardens for generations as hedge, screen, and clipped structure. 'Hoskins Shadow' is a standout among the named forms: a dense, fast-growing shrub or small tree, 15 to 20 feet in time, chosen for unusually large, dark green foliage and, above all, for cold hardiness well beyond the ordinary yaupon.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–20 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, mental & emotional well-being, detoxification & cleansing
The red mulberry, Morus rubra, is the eastern woodlands' own mulberry, a medium to large deciduous tree native across the eastern United States from New England to Texas. The genus name Morus is simply the old Latin word for mulberry, and rubra, red, points less to the ripe fruit, which darkens to near black, than to the reddish cast of the young growth. Broad, heart-shaped, sandpaper-rough leaves clothe a wide, rounded crown, and where a female tree grows the summer branches hang heavy with blackberry-like fruit.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
40–60 ft.
Spread
25–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Myrica rubra, the Chinese bayberry or yangmei, is a fruiting evergreen tree from the misty mountains of East Asia, revered for centuries across China and Japan for tangy-sweet berries and an elegant, shapely form. Imagine cherries and cranberries with a botanical lovechild that had the moodiness of a plum and the antioxidant punch of a superfruit, and something close to yangmei would be the result. The current stock is female, tissue-cultured clones of a named selection.
Few native plants look as improbable as the maypop. Passiflora incarnata, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast, opens intricate three-inch flowers of pale lavender and white, each ringed with a fringed corona of wavy filaments above a central column of stamens and styles. Spanish missionaries read the whole Passion of Christ into that structure, the corona for the crown of thorns, the five anthers for the wounds, the three styles for the nails, and gave the genus its devotional name. Common along field edges and roadsides from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, the vine climbs by curling tendrils or sprawls across open ground.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–25 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
Passiflora incarnata alba is the rare pure white form of the native maypop, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast. The flower keeps all the improbable structure of the species, an intricate three-inch bloom with a fringed corona above a central column of stamens and styles, but drained of every trace of lavender: white petals, white sepals, and a white corona, luminous and cool against the deep green foliage. The effect is a ghostly, refined version of a familiar roadside wildflower.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–15 ft.
Spread
3–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
The procimequat is a rare and fascinating citrus hybrid, born from a botanical marriage of the Eustis limequat (itself a cross of kumquat and lime) and the Hong Kong kumquat (Fortunella hindsii). The result is a precocious, compact plant that combines the zesty lime tang of the limequat parent with the tiny, ornamental charm of the wild kumquats, all on a frame small enough for a patio pot.
