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.
The southern maidenhair has a way of choosing impossible places. Look for this fern on a shaded limestone bluff where water seeps through the rock, or in the spray zone of a spring-fed creek, and you will likely find the fronds growing sideways out of a crevice as if that were the most natural thing in the world. The wiry black stems hold up fan-shaped pinnules so thin they seem almost translucent in morning light, and the whole plant trembles at the slightest breath of air. Few native ferns carry this much delicacy with so little fuss.
Amorpha fruticosa, the false indigo bush, is the largest and most widespread of the native false indigos, a fast, open, deciduous shrub that carries long spires of tiny deep blue-purple flowers, each lit with a single vivid orange anther, at the branch tips in late spring and early summer. From a suckering base rise arching stems six to twelve feet tall, clothed in soft, ferny, pinnate leaves that give off a clean, resinous scent when crushed. In full bloom the whole shrub seems to smoke with color, and the flower spikes hum with bees.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–12 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, pain relief, topical applications
Ampelaster carolinianus is a woody, scrambling, semi-evergreen vine that climbs through shrubs and over stream banks along the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, opening lavender-blue flowers in November and December when every other aster has long since finished. The climbing aster keeps a private schedule, and that contrary timing is the whole charm.
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
Canna flaccida is the wild golden canna of the Southern coastal plain, a native perennial with the broad, light green, tropical-looking leaves of the genus and large soft yellow flowers held above them in summer. Where the heavy garden cannas read as bedding, this species keeps a looser, wilder grace, the petals thin and almost orchid-like, opening in the morning and lasting a day.
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.
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.
Hibiscus coccineus 'Lone Star' is the pure white form of the scarlet rose mallow, and the change of color changes everything. Where the wild species blazes red, 'Lone Star' opens great five-pointed stars of clean, luminous white, five to seven inches across, glowing against deep green, finely cut foliage and all the more striking in the soft light of evening. The same tall, architectural native frame carries a cooler, more serene presence.
Cuban rose mallow is one of the tall, slender members of the perennial hibiscus tribe, a plant that reads as airy and upright rather than bushy. Through the summer the stems carry fairly large flowers in a soft purplish pink, the classic mallow saucer set against distinctly gray-green foliage, and the stems themselves are lightly prickly to the touch. Rising to seven or ten feet on narrow clumps, the plant lifts the bloom well up where the color can be seen from a distance.
Hibiscus moscheutos, the rose mallow, is the hardiest of the perennial hibiscus and the tough, cold-proof parent behind most of the dinner-plate hibiscus sold today. The wild plant is a stout, clump-forming perennial of eastern marshes, rising to six or eight feet each summer and opening broad flowers to six inches and more, clean white or soft pink with a dramatic crimson eye at the center. For sheer size of bloom on a plant that shrugs off hard winters, little else compares.
Hypericum reductum is the ground-hugging member of the family, a low, heathery evergreen that mounds and mats rather than climbing, rarely rising much above the knee. The stems are crowded with fine, needle-like, deep green leaves that give an almost coniferous texture, and through late spring and summer the whole low sweep is dotted with small, bright yellow, star-shaped flowers full of stamens.
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.
Physostegia correllii, Correll's obedient plant, is a rare and handsome member of the mint family, a robust, upright, somewhat succulent perennial rising from thick, spreading rhizomes. Among the false dragonheads the species stands out for unusually dark, glossy green leaves and cool purplish-pink flowers streaked and spotted with darker purple, an inch long and packed into dense terminal spikes.
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.
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.
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
