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.
Few native grasses put on a show like Muhlenbergia capillaris. For most of the year pink muhly is a modest, upright tuft of fine, wiry, dark green blades, easy to overlook. Then, in the shortening days of autumn, the whole clump erupts into a haze of tiny flowers, an airy cloud of pink to rose-red that seems to hover a foot above the foliage and glows when backlit by low sun. Massed in a drift, the effect is one of the most spectacular in the fall garden.
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
'Shortwood' is one of the best of the tall garden phloxes, a strong pink that stands up straight and blooms for weeks in the heart of summer. Each large, domed panicle is packed with fragrant flowers, clear rose-pink around a deeper magenta eye, and the whole plant reads from across the garden, four feet of upright color that never seems to flop.
Phlox pilosa, the downy or prairie phlox, is a native of open woods, prairies, and glades across much of the eastern and central United States, and 'Eco Happy Traveler' is one of the most rewarding garden selections, made for a spreading habit and a long run of clear rose-pink bloom. The soft, downy stems and narrow leaves give the plant the common name, and the whole low mat is topped in late spring by loose clusters of fragrant, five-petaled flowers.
Physostegia virginiana, the obedient plant, is a familiar native of moist meadows and streamsides across eastern North America, and 'Vivid' is the compact, richly colored selection that has become a garden standard. Upright spikes of deep rose-pink, tubular flowers rise on square, mint-family stems in mid to late summer, holding strong color into early fall when much of the border is fading.
Pieris phillyreifolia, the climbing fetterbush, is one of the strangest and most wonderful of Southeastern natives, an evergreen member of the heath family with a habit unlike any other hardy shrub. In cultivation the plant grows as a neat, small evergreen shrub of two to three feet, clothed in narrow, leathery dark green leaves about an inch long.
This is one of William Bartram's oaks. He came upon the tree on his travels through the southeastern backcountry in the 1770s, and the botanical name still carries his hand, Quercus hemisphaerica Bartram ex Willd., the species epithet meaning half-a-globe, for the little domed cap that sits like a skullcap on the acorn.
Nuttall oak is named for Thomas Nuttall, the restless English-American naturalist who botanized the young United States more thoroughly than almost anyone of his generation. Long known as Quercus nuttallii, the tree now carries the name Quercus texana in most botanical usage, a change that has caused no end of confusion, since the name once belonged to a different oak. Whatever the label, this is a large deciduous red oak of the Southern bottomlands, at home in the floodplain forests of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley.
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 urticifolia, the nettleleaf sage, is an uncommon herbaceous perennial native to the Appalachians and the wider Southeast, grown for cool blue-to-violet flowers set off by a pair of white marks in the throat. The bloom comes in the freshness of mid to late spring, the flowers hovering above serrated, nettle-like leaves, and in a generous year a lighter second flush may follow in late summer.
Cup plant is a giant of the summer prairie, a statuesque perennial that rises on stout, square stems to eight feet or more and lifts a crown of bright yellow, daisy-like flowers above the border. The name comes from a quirk of the foliage: the large, coarse leaves are perfoliate, joined in pairs around the stem to form a shallow cup that catches and holds rainwater. Silphium perfoliatum belongs to the sunflower tribe of the aster family, Asteraceae, and shares that clan's generosity of bloom.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support, pain relief, digestive health
Florists across the South have a name for the green that turns up at every wedding worth attending and every Christmas mantel worth dressing: Jackson vine. Southern smilax, if that is how you came up. The town of Evergreen, Alabama took its name from this very plant, which gives you some idea how far Smilax smallii has wound itself into the region's notion of celebration. Looped down a staircase, run along an altar, drawn the length of a table, they are the foliage that announces something is happening here.
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
The muscadine is the South's own grape, and 'Triumph' is one of the finest for the home garden. Vitis rotundifolia is a vigorous native vine of the southeastern United States, the first North American grape brought into cultivation, long grown for thick-skinned, intensely flavored fruit and the honeyed wines of Scuppernong fame. 'Triumph', a bronze-fruited selection, carries that heritage forward with unusual quality and ease.
There are few sights more stirring than a wisteria in bloom, and 'Amethyst Falls' offers all the romance without the unruly habits of the Asian cousins. This refined selection of the native American wisteria, Wisteria frutescens, pours out cascades of fragrant, lavender-violet blossoms in late spring, with smaller flushes through summer, a soft echo of springtime returning again and again.
For the first sixty-five years in the books, this vine was filed as a kind of soybean. Linnaeus named the plant Glycine frutescens in 1753, frutescens meaning turning shrubby, and there the classification sat until 1818, when Thomas Nuttall looked again, decided a woody climber of the southern riverbanks deserved a genus apart, and named the vine for his friend Caspar Wistar, the Philadelphia anatomist. Somewhere between the man and the plant a vowel slipped, Wistar becoming Wisteria, and the misspelling has outlived everyone involved.
The white form of the latest-blooming native. Wisteria macrostachya 'Clara Mack' is a twining, deciduous Kentucky wisteria with compound leaves and long, hanging clusters of pure white flowers, a splendid white version of a species normally blue. The racemes run longer and open later than those of the other native, Wisteria frutescens, extending the native wisteria season.
