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.
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.
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.
Acca sellowiana, the pineapple guava, is that rare plant that is handsome enough for the border and generous enough for the kitchen. It came to botanical notice through the German naturalist Friedrich Sellow, who collected it in southern Brazil in 1819, and it carries his name still; for years it was known, and is often still sold, as Feijoa sellowiana. Its true home is the subtropical highlands of southern Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and northern Argentina, and from there it has traveled to warm gardens the world over.
A graceful native onion, Allium cernuum, the nodding onion, lifts loose clusters of pink to lavender, bell-shaped flowers that bend over in a soft arc at the top of slender stems, swaying through mid and late summer above tufts of grassy, blue-green foliage. The nodding habit gives the plant a particular charm, and the flowers draw native bees, butterflies, and other pollinators in good numbers.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
12–18 in.
Spread
6–8 in.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, immune support
Sweet almond verbena is grown for one glorious thing above all: scent. From midsummer until hard frost, Aloysia virgata tips every branch with slender spikes of small white flowers that pour out an intoxicating vanilla-almond fragrance, strongest in the late afternoon and evening and carrying clear across a garden. Butterflies and hummingbirds work the spikes all season.
Swamp milkweed brings beauty and biodiversity to the moist garden. Asclepias incarnata is a native perennial prized for domed clusters of rosy pink, vanilla-scented flowers and for a vital role in feeding pollinators, native to wet meadows, streambanks, and lowland prairies across much of North America. The plant takes happily to rain gardens, wet soils, and sunny borders alike, a natural for the ecologically minded gardener.
Hardy begonia is the surprise of the shade border: a true begonia that survives a cold winter. Begonia grandis carries large, pointed, olive-green leaves lit with red veins and flushed deep rose-red beneath, and in late summer and fall hangs loose clusters of soft pink flowers on red-tinted stems, a cool, luminous note when most shade plants have finished.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine with bright trumpet flowers, and 'Helen Fredel' is a large-flowered selection in red-orange with a yellow throat, a shade between the old varieties 'Atrosanguinea' and 'Tangerine Beauty'. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine flowers heavily in early summer and again, more lightly, later, and shows to best effect on a fence, an arbor, or a trellis in sun or part shade.
Crossvine is a high-climbing, semi-evergreen native vine, and 'Tangerine Beauty' is the famous tangerine-orange selection, opening a spring blaze of bright orange, trumpet-shaped flowers and blooming again, more lightly, through the season. Climbing high by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, the crossvine shows to best effect on a fence, a wall, or a trellis in sun or part shade, where the early trumpets draw hummingbirds in numbers.
Crossvine is a vigorous, semi-evergreen native climber that ascends by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, and var. atrosanguinea is the red one: where the typical crossvine flowers orange, this striking selection, introduced by Woodlanders, carries abundant deep red to red-purple trumpets, often over narrower, longer leaves. The flowers even smell faintly of mocha on a warm day.
Bouvardia ternifolia, the firecracker bush, is a compact, heat-loving shrub of the southwestern United States and Mexico, hung from late spring to frost with clusters of long, slender, scarlet-red tubular flowers. Few plants pull hummingbirds in like this one: the bright tubes are pitched exactly for their bills, and the bloom keeps coming through the hottest months when little else holds color.
Buddleia alternifolia, the fountain or alternate-leaf butterfly bush, stands apart from the usual butterfly-bush crowd. A deciduous shrub native to northwestern China, the fountain butterfly bush is the most cold-hardy of the genus, and is grown above all for a weeping form and an early-season flood of fragrant, lavender-purple bloom.
Buddleia lindleyana, Lindley's butterfly bush, is the elegant outlier of the genus, an open, arching shrub from China hung in summer with long, slender, gracefully curved racemes of purple-violet flowers. Where most butterfly bushes carry stiff cone-shaped panicles, this one drapes, the curving spikes nodding from the tips of the branches from June until frost.
A yellow-flowered butterfly bush, Buddleia x weyeriana 'Honeycomb' is a vigorous hybrid of Buddleia globosa and Buddleia davidii that the late Dr. Michael Dirr judged better than the older 'Sungold'. The plant came to Dirr from Crathes Castle Garden in Scotland, bought as the variety 'E.H. Wilson' but proving to be a very different and superior yellow butterfly bush, named 'Honeycomb' and a standout in Georgia trials, flowering as late as Thanksgiving.
Buddleja salviifolia, the sage-leaf butterfly bush, is a medium to large evergreen shrub from the sun-soaked hillsides of South Africa, and despite the exotic origin the plant has proven remarkably hardy in southeastern gardens, coming through winters at the University of Georgia's Athens trials with quiet resilience.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
