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.
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
Of all the plants that carry Sir Joseph Banks's name, and there are a great many, this rose carries his wife's. Banks was the most powerful botanist of his age: president of the Royal Society, the man who effectively built Kew, who had sailed with Cook to the far side of the world. When a thornless climbing rose came west out of the Chinese gardens, it was named not for him but for Dorothea, Lady Banks. The white double arrived first, collected at Canton in 1807. This one, the yellow, followed in 1824, carried back by the plant hunter John Damper Parks by way of the Calcutta botanic garden, an old Chinese garden form that had been grown and selected for generations before any Englishman set eyes on it.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Salix chaenomeloides, the Japanese pussy willow, is a fast-growing shrub or small tree native to Japan, Korea, and parts of China, long valued in East Asian gardens for the show the plant makes in the depths of winter. Well before the leaves break, the bare branches set fat, silvery-white catkins with a soft, velvety nap, the largest and most striking of any pussy willow, and the branches are cut by the armful for early-spring arrangements.
Salvia 'Indigo Spires' is a big, free-flowering hybrid sage grown for the long, tapering wands of violet-blue bloom it throws from early summer straight through to frost. Each spike packs small, rich violet flowers tightly in whorls above dark, near-black calyces, and the spikes lengthen and curve as the season goes, so a settled clump reads as a haze of deep blue-purple for months on end. Few perennials give so much color for so long a run.
Salvia leucantha, the Mexican bush sage, is one of the great fall salvias, grown for arching wands of flower that seem spun from felt. Long spikes rise above the foliage in late summer and fall, densely packed with velvety purple calyces from which small white corollas emerge, a soft two-tone effect that catches low autumn light and holds for weeks. Few plants close the gardening year with such generous, easy color.
Some plants arrive with a pedigree, and some arrive with a person. This one came to us from Ken Wurdack, a botanist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and his work centers on the systematics and evolution of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. He's the sort of botanist who describes entirely new genera in the tribe Hippomaneae, which happens to be the exact tribe Sebastiania sits in. So this is a spurge handed over by a man who names spurges for a living, which is about the best reference a euphorb could ask for.
Senecio confusus, commonly known as the Mexican Flame Vine, hails from the warm, sun-soaked regions of Mexico and Central America. This vibrant climbing vine has been cherished for generations, not only for a striking appearance but also for resilience and versatility in various landscapes.
Bald cypress is the great deciduous conifer of the southern swamp, a long-lived, stately tree of river margins, bottomlands, and blackwater sloughs across the southern United States, and one of the most beautiful native trees the region has to offer. Soft, feathery, two-ranked needles clothe the branches in a light, bright green through summer, then turn a warm russet-orange and fall, leaving a broad, pyramidal frame bare for winter.
Thelypteris acuminata is a handsome evergreen fern from the woodlands of Japan and eastern Asia, grown for glossy green fronds that arch softly and hold their color through the year. Unlike the many deciduous ferns that vanish in winter, this species keeps a steady, structural presence in the shaded garden, one of the reasons the plant is prized where an evergreen fern is wanted.
The southern shield fern carries a longer pedigree than most ferns in cultivation. The type specimen was collected by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland near Cumanacoa, in the cloud-shrouded country around Caripe in northeastern Venezuela, during their five-year expedition through the equinoctial Americas. Decades later the German botanist Carl Sigismund Kunth, Humboldt's assistant in Paris and the man who would spend years describing the ten thousand and more specimens the explorers shipped home, became the namesake when Nicaise Auguste Desvaux formally described the species in 1827 as Nephrodium kunthii. C.V. Morton moved the fern into Thelypteris in 1967, and recent molecular work (Fawcett and Smith, 2021) has shifted the name again into Pelazoneuron, though the older binomial remains the one in common horticultural use.
A Victorian-era English selection of one of the great trees of North America. The species, Thuja plicata, the western red cedar, is the dominant conifer of the Pacific Northwest coastal rainforest, the tree that towers 150 to 200 feet above the forest floor in old-growth stands of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California, with individual specimens documented at over a thousand years old. To the Coast Salish, Haida, Tlingit, Kwakwaka'wakw, and other Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples, western red cedar is the Tree of Life: the wood used for longhouses, dugout canoes, totem poles, and ceremonial regalia; the bark woven into baskets, mats, capes, and dress; the whole tree a structural and cultural foundation for thousands of years. That natural rot-resistance comes from the same volatile terpenoids that give the crushed foliage a sweet, cedary fragrance, the smell of the Pacific Northwest forest itself.
Blue vervain rises in summer as a candelabra of slender, pencil-thin spikes, each one lit from the base upward with tiny, five-lobed flowers in a saturated purplish blue that few native perennials can match. Verbena hastata is a clump-forming perennial of eastern North America, reaching two to four feet in good ground and occasionally stretching to six, on stiff, square, hairy stems that branch toward the top. The lance-shaped leaves are sharply toothed and rough to the touch, a coarse green foil for the refined flower spikes above. Bloom comes slowly and deliberately from July into September, only a few florets open on each spike at any moment, so the plant seems to smolder for weeks rather than flare all at once.
Luzon viburnum is one of the quiet unknowns of Southern gardening, a handsome large shrub grown around Houston for years and almost nowhere else in the United States. Woodlanders collected this plant in the Houston area, where the species had already proven durable and undemanding in Gulf Coast heat. Viburnum luzonicum comes from open forest, scrub, and roadside thickets across southern China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and the epithet points to Luzon, largest of the Philippine islands, from which Robert Allen Rolfe described the species at Kew.
Some plants stand quietly in the garden, and some speak. Vitex agnus-castus has been speaking for more than two thousand years, from sun-washed Mediterranean shores to monastery cloisters, from the herbals of ancient Greece to the borders of Southern gardens. In Homer's day the fragrant leaves and lavender flower spikes were woven into ritual garlands. The Romans knew the shrub as the chaste tree, a name wrapped in legend, since the peppery seeds were once thought to cool passion, which earned the seeds the cloister nickname of monk's pepper. The double name says as much twice over: agnus is Latin for lamb and castus for chaste, while the genus Vitex comes from vieo, to weave, a nod to the pliant branches once bent into baskets.
A rain lily that flowers on a whim of the weather, and a plant that spent nearly forty years under the wrong name. Zephyranthes macrosiphon is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to eastern Mexico, grown for vivid rose-pink flowers that open as if overnight after warm-season rain.
A seldom-seen species with old-world charm, Abelia chinensis is a deciduous shrub native to China and one of the foundational parents of the widely grown Abelia x grandiflora. Far less common in American gardens than its hybrid offspring, the true species offers its own quiet distinctions: larger foliage, a fuller habit, and a long summer season of bloom that makes it a thoughtful choice for collectors and pollinator gardeners alike.
Abutilon megapotamicum is the trailing one of the flowering maples, a slender, half-vining deciduous shrub that drapes and clambers rather than standing stiffly upright. Its species name means "of the big river," for the Rio Grande basin of southern Brazil where it grows wild, and like the rest of its tribe it belongs not to the maples its leaves suggest but to the mallow family, in company with hibiscus and hollyhock.
Agarista populifolia, still catalogued nearly everywhere as Leucothoe populifolia, is the giant of a group otherwise built low to the ground. Where most leucothoes hug the shade at knee height, this one rises, sending up tall, erect stems that arch at the tips into a fountain of glossy evergreen leaves, and given years and room the shrub can pass for a small multi-stemmed tree of twelve to fifteen feet.
