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.
Native to the open prairies and meadows of North America, Coreopsis lanceolata, the lanceleaf coreopsis, has long been admired for bright, golden-yellow blooms and an easy, hardy nature. This perennial wildflower has been a staple of North American landscapes for a very long time, growing across a wide range of climates and soils, from sandy coastal ground to the rich prairies of the Midwest.
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.
The name requires a brief clarification, and then we can move on to the more interesting parts. Hibiscus mutabilis has been called the Confederate rose since the nineteenth century, when the plant naturalized so thoroughly in the gardens of the American South that people assumed it belonged there. The plant does not. The species belongs to Hunan Province in China, where gardeners have grown the shrub for nearly three thousand years, where the flower serves as the emblem of Chengdu, a city known on its account as the City of Hibiscus, and where classical texts on materia medica describe the flowers and leaves in medicinal detail. The name stuck here out of regional habit rather than botanical or historical accuracy, and the plant is indifferent to the label.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
10–15 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support
'Annabelle' is a wild American shrub with a hometown. Around 1910 two sisters, Harriet and Amy Kirkpatrick, spotted an unusually full-flowered smooth hydrangea in the woods of Union County, Illinois, dug the plant, and grew it in their garden in the town of Anna. For half a century the shrub passed hand to hand around southern Illinois as a nameless local treasure, until the University of Illinois plantsman Dr. Joseph C. McDaniel traced the trail back to Anna in the 1960s, selected the plant, and released it for sale in 1962. The name 'Annabelle' honors both the town and the Kirkpatrick belles who found the shrub: Anna plus belle.
Hypericum prolificum lives up to the name, prolific, disappearing each summer under a heavy crop of bright yellow flowers, each three-quarters of an inch to an inch across and stuffed with a golden brush of stamens. The shrub is dense and rounded, with arching branches, narrow shiny leaves, and reddish, exfoliating bark that peels to show paler layers once the foliage thins.
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
Jasminum nudiflorum, the winter jasmine, is the great cold-weather bloomer of the genus, a deciduous scrambling shrub from western China that opens bright yellow, six-petaled flowers on bare green stems in the depth of winter, often from January into March, long before the leaves return. The name says as much: nudiflorum, the naked-flowering jasmine, blooming on stripped, leafless wands.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
3–4 ft.
Spread
4–7 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, general wellness, immune support, digestive health
The shrimp plant earns the name honestly. The arching flower spikes are built of overlapping bronze-to-pink bracts, each one curved and shingled over the next, so that the whole drooping cluster reads unmistakably as the tail of a boiled shrimp. This is the soft pink form, gentler in color than the coppery-salmon type most people picture, and out of the bracts slip the true flowers: slender, white, two-lipped tubes freckled with maroon at the throat.
There is something quietly instructive about the range of Magnolia virginiana. The species runs from the cold, swampy woods of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where a small population clings to the northern edge of the natural territory, all the way down to the Gulf Coast of Texas, a span of climate and geography that would seem to demand two entirely different plants. In the North the sweetbay obliges by turning deciduous, multi-stemmed, and compact, staying modest in deference to the winters. In the South the same species becomes something else entirely, a tall, evergreen tree of real stature. Botanists eventually gave the northern form a name of its own, var. virginiana, and that is what Woodlanders grows here, raised from seed collected at the Massachusetts limit of the range.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
20–40 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, general wellness
'Jacob Cline' is the beebalm to beat for sheer red, a native perennial that throws big, deep-crimson flowerheads on tall stems through the heart of summer. The whorled, tubular blooms sit atop four to five feet of square, mint-family stems, and they pull in hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies with a persistence few perennials match; in one major trial 'Jacob Cline' was the single best beebalm for hummingbirds.
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
Southern wax myrtle is one of the hardest-working native evergreens of the Southeast, and 'Emperor' is a nursery selection of that adaptable shrub. Fast-growing and densely branched, wax myrtle forms a large evergreen shrub or a small multi-trunked tree, clothed in narrow, olive-green leaves that release a clean, spicy, bayberry scent when crushed. The plant thrives where many shrubs fail, from wet ground to dry sand, in sun or shade, on the coast or inland.
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
Patrinia scabiosifolia 'Nagoya' is a tough, upright perennial from the meadows and grassy hills of East Asia, grown for airy, flat-topped heads of tiny golden-yellow flowers held high on wiry, branching stems. The species name scabiosifolia points to the deeply lobed basal leaves, which recall those of a scabious, and the whole plant reads as a chartreuse-gold answer to Queen Anne's lace, lending height and a see-through veil to a summer border. In Japan the species is one of the classic seven flowers of autumn, and 'Nagoya' is a garden selection prized for reliable, compact performance.
Salix eriocephala, the heart-leaved or Missouri River willow, is a graceful native shrub, sometimes a modest multi-stemmed tree, of riverbanks and wet meadows across northern and eastern North America. The plant rises on several trunks clad in coarse gray bark, reaching roughly eight to a dozen feet in the garden and more in wild thickets, and the epithet eriocephala, meaning woolly-headed, points to the soft, silky catkins that give the willow much of its charm.
Salvia microphylla 'Deltoid' is a shrubby form of the littleleaf or baby sage grown for warm salmon-coral flowers and neat, triangular, deltoid leaves. The small tubular blooms open over a long season and read as a soft coral against the fine, glossy foliage, a gentler tone than the hot scarlet of many littleleaf sages.
Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' is the famous temperature-shifting bicolor of the littleleaf sages, and the trick is worth the fame. In the cool of spring the flowers may open pure white or pure red, but as summer heat builds they turn strikingly two-tone, white below with a bold red lip, so that a single plant can carry white, red, and red-and-white flowers all at once. The show runs from late spring until frost.
