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.
Tripterygium regelii is a big, rambling, almost vine-like shrub from the temperate woodlands of Japan, Korea, and Manchuria, closely related to the celebrated thunder god vine of Chinese medicine. The genus name is a piece of plain description: from the Greek treis, three, and pteryx, a wing, for the papery three-winged fruits that hang in pale green clusters after flowering. The species honors Eduard von Regel, the nineteenth-century botanist who directed the St. Petersburg botanical garden. The English name, Regel's threewingnut, keeps both the man and the winged nutlet in view.
Vaccinium sempervirens is one of the rarest plants in this catalog, an evergreen blueberry known in the wild from a single sandy corner of Lexington County, in the Sandhills of South Carolina. A true local endemic, the plant grows along Atlantic white cedar bogs and seepage slopes where the water table sits high and the sand stays acid, and to grow one is to hold a small piece of a landscape almost nobody has seen.
Deerberry is the odd one out among the wild Southern blueberries, a loose, variable native shrub of dry, sandy uplands, pinewoods, and old-field edges across the eastern and central United States. The flowers give the plant its botanical name: where most blueberries hide their stamens inside closed urns, deerberry opens wide, greenish-white bells with the yellow stamens thrust well beyond the petals, so the species is stamineum, of the stamens. The common name is plainer still, since deer are as fond of the ripe fruit as any creature in the woods.
A superior selection of the ancient chaste tree, chosen for the size and color of the bloom. Vitex agnus-castus 'Shoal Creek' is a deciduous large shrub or small tree, native in the species to southern Europe and western Asia and long grown across the South for a long season of summer flower. The palmate, aromatic leaves have now and then been mistaken for those of cannabis, a passing resemblance that gives the plant a certain conversational charm.
A tough, salt-defying seaside groundcover with a serious caveat. Vitex rotundifolia, best known as beach vitex, is a low, prostrate, trailing shrub of the mint family, native to the coasts of eastern Asia, the Pacific islands, and Australia, where the plant binds shifting sand along the shore. Rounded, blue-green leaves about two inches across clothe the running stems, aromatic and slightly spicy when crushed, and spikes of bright lavender-blue flowers open in late summer.
A brightly variegated cousin of the chaste tree, grown for foliage as much as flower. Vitex trifolia, sometimes called the three-leaf chaste tree or Arabian lilac, is a warm-climate shrub of the mint family, native along tropical and subtropical coasts from eastern Africa through southern Asia to Australia and the Pacific. The species name trifolia points to the leaves, usually held in threes, and the selection 'Variegata' edges each gray-green leaflet in creamy white for a cool, luminous effect.
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.
A timeless favorite with a bright twist. Weigela florida 'Variegata' is a compact, deciduous shrub grown for two gifts at once: cream-edged, softly variegated foliage and a late-spring flood of deep rose-pink, trumpet-shaped flowers. The genus honors the German botanist Christian Ehrenfried Weigel, and the species florida, meaning flowering, ranges as a wild plant through northern China, Korea, and Japan.
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.
A brand-new intergeneric hybrid, and a small horticultural triumph. Dr. Tom Ranney of the North Carolina State University research station in Fletcher succeeded in crossing two icons of the Southern flora: the legendary Franklinia alatamaha, the lost Franklin tree that has not been seen in the wild since the early 1800s, with the native loblolly bay, Gordonia lasianthus. The result is xGordlinia grandiflora, a bigeneric cross that carries the best of both parents.
One of the finest shade trees for a hard place. Zelkova serrata, the Japanese zelkova, is a deciduous tree of the elm family, native to Japan, Korea, and eastern China, long valued as the sacred keyaki of Japanese temples and a prized timber and bonsai subject. In the West the tree has become a leading street and lawn tree, in no small part as a graceful, disease-resistant stand-in for the American elms lost to Dutch elm disease.
A native lily that answers the rain. Zephyranthes atamasco, the atamasco lily or rain lily, is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to moist woods and meadows of the Southeastern United States. The name atamasco comes from the Powhatan people of the Virginia tidewater, an old word carried into botany, and the plant has also long been called Easter lily for the season of bloom.
