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 name requires a brief clarification, and then we can move on to the more interesting parts. Hibiscus mutabilis has been called the Confederate rose since the nineteenth century, when the plant naturalized so thoroughly in the gardens of the American South that people assumed it belonged there. The plant does not. The species belongs to Hunan Province in China, where gardeners have grown the shrub for nearly three thousand years, where the flower serves as the emblem of Chengdu, a city known on its account as the City of Hibiscus, and where classical texts on materia medica describe the flowers and leaves in medicinal detail. The name stuck here out of regional habit rather than botanical or historical accuracy, and the plant is indifferent to the label.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
10–15 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support
Hibiscus palustris is the northern, cold-hardy face of the American rose-mallows, a marsh dweller whose species name comes straight from the Latin palus, a swamp or marsh. Botanists today often fold the plant into Hibiscus moscheutos as a subspecies, but the old name still travels with the pink-flowered marsh plants of the Northeast, and gardeners know exactly which plant the name marks. Where many tropical hibiscus sulk at the first frost, this perennial dies cleanly to the ground each winter and returns from a woody crown, unfazed by zone 5 cold.
'Annabelle' is a wild American shrub with a hometown. Around 1910 two sisters, Harriet and Amy Kirkpatrick, spotted an unusually full-flowered smooth hydrangea in the woods of Union County, Illinois, dug the plant, and grew it in their garden in the town of Anna. For half a century the shrub passed hand to hand around southern Illinois as a nameless local treasure, until the University of Illinois plantsman Dr. Joseph C. McDaniel traced the trail back to Anna in the 1960s, selected the plant, and released it for sale in 1962. The name 'Annabelle' honors both the town and the Kirkpatrick belles who found the shrub: Anna plus belle.
Hypericum densiflorum earns the name densiflorum, densely flowered, in high summer, when the twiggy shrub disappears under rounded clusters of small golden flowers, each one a starburst of fine stamens above five clean yellow petals. Bees work the blooms from July into September, and as the show fades the narrow dark green leaves turn a warm yellow, giving way in winter to reddish, lightly peeling bark on the older stems.
Hypericum frondosum 'Sunburst' is the garden-refined face of a tough native shrub, a compact, rounded selection that mounds to about three feet and fills each summer with powderpuff golden flowers, the largest in the species at nearly two inches across, each a dense brush of stamens over broad yellow petals. The leaves are a cool blue-green, and as the season turns the older stems reveal red-brown, exfoliating bark, so the shrub keeps a quiet interest well past bloom.
Hypericum lloydii is one of the fine-textured St. John's Worts, a low, wiry evergreen shrub clothed in needle-like leaves so slender that the plant carries a heathery, almost coniferous look. Through the summer the stems light up with showy yellow flowers, each a shallow cup packed with stamens, held above foliage that stays green through the year.
Hypericum prolificum lives up to the name, prolific, disappearing each summer under a heavy crop of bright yellow flowers, each three-quarters of an inch to an inch across and stuffed with a golden brush of stamens. The shrub is dense and rounded, with arching branches, narrow shiny leaves, and reddish, exfoliating bark that peels to show paler layers once the foliage thins.
Yaupon is the small-leaved evergreen holly of the southeastern coastal plain, native from Virginia to Texas and a member of the holly family, Aquifoliaceae. Adaptable almost to a fault, salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and content in sun or shade, the species takes shearing as neatly as boxwood and has served Southern gardens for generations as hedge, screen, and clipped structure. 'Hoskins Shadow' is a standout among the named forms: a dense, fast-growing shrub or small tree, 15 to 20 feet in time, chosen for unusually large, dark green foliage and, above all, for cold hardiness well beyond the ordinary yaupon.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–20 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, mental & emotional well-being, detoxification & cleansing
Ted Stephens of Nurseries Caroliniana calls this one of his top ten favorite plants, and the reason is bloom. Indigofera amblyantha, the pink indigo, is a fast, airy, deciduous shrub from the streambanks of central China, a nitrogen-fixing legume in the vast genus Indigofera, and one of the longest-flowering hardy shrubs a Southern garden can grow.
Indigofera heterantha, the Himalayan indigo, is a graceful deciduous shrub from the mountains of the western Himalaya, a nitrogen-fixing legume grown for a long summer-into-fall run of rosy-purple pea flowers over ferny foliage. Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, notes that the species has performed admirably in his Georgia trials, and the plant has earned a quiet following among Southern gardeners for toughness and length of bloom.
Seen from across a summer garden, Ipomoea fistulosa could pass for one of the great perennial hibiscus, a big soft-wooded bush hung with pink funnels. Look closer and the flowers give the game away: these are true morning glories, five-petaled trumpets in shell to lavender-pink with a deeper throat, carried in loose clusters above broad, bright green leaves. Better known to botanists as Ipomoea carnea subspecies fistulosa, the bush morning glory breaks the family mold by climbing nothing at all, standing instead as an upright shrub six to ten feet tall.
Jasminum beesianum, the red jasmine or Bee's jasmine, breaks the mold of a genus known for white and yellow flowers. This vigorous, semi-evergreen twining climber from the mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan carries small, star-shaped blooms in a deep rose to velvet-red, an unusual color among the jasmines, softly and sweetly fragrant, opening in late spring over slender stems and small, pointed green leaves.
Jasminum nudiflorum, the winter jasmine, is the great cold-weather bloomer of the genus, a deciduous scrambling shrub from western China that opens bright yellow, six-petaled flowers on bare green stems in the depth of winter, often from January into March, long before the leaves return. The name says as much: nudiflorum, the naked-flowering jasmine, blooming on stripped, leafless wands.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
3–4 ft.
Spread
4–7 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, general wellness, immune support, digestive health
Jasminum officinale, the poet's jasmine, is the classic hardy jasmine of old gardens, a vigorous twining vine hung with intensely fragrant white flowers through summer. 'Fiona Sunrise' is a gold-leaved form of that familiar plant, raised at Fromefield Nursery in England and registered under the cultivar name 'Frojas': the new leaves emerge a bright chartreuse-gold, lighting a trellis or fence, and soften to green as the season goes on, while the sweetly scented white flowers open from late spring into summer.
Jasminum polyanthum, the pink jasmine or Chinese jasmine, is the most floriferous of the group, a fast, evergreen twining vine that smothers a support in late winter and spring with clouds of intensely fragrant white flowers opening from deep pink buds. Native to China, the plant is beloved wherever winters are mild for the sheer volume of bloom and a perfume strong enough to fill a garden or a room.
Some plants arrive at the nursery already wearing a mystery, and this jasmine is one of them. The stock was gathered high on a mountain pass above the White Water River in northwestern Yunnan, at roughly ten thousand feet, in the tumbled country of travertine terraces and snow peaks near Baishuitai that the Naxi people hold sacred. The collector, hedging as any honest collector will, noted only that this was probably a scandent shrub, and that guarded phrase is still the truest thing anyone can say about the plant's habit.
Justicia brandegeana, the shrimp plant, is a subtropical evergreen shrub from Mexico, grown the world over for the curious, shrimp-like flower spikes that give the plant its name: arching, overlapping bracts in warm coppery orange, salmon, and rust, from which small white flowers peek like a shrimp's legs. The bracts hold their color for weeks, so a well-grown plant seems always in bloom.
The shrimp plant earns the name honestly. The arching flower spikes are built of overlapping bronze-to-pink bracts, each one curved and shingled over the next, so that the whole drooping cluster reads unmistakably as the tail of a boiled shrimp. This is the soft pink form, gentler in color than the coppery-salmon type most people picture, and out of the bracts slip the true flowers: slender, white, two-lipped tubes freckled with maroon at the throat.
Among crape myrtles, Lagerstroemia fauriei is the aristocrat grown as much for bark as for bloom. A small, multi-stemmed, deciduous tree from Yakushima Island in southern Japan, first brought to botanical attention in the 1950s, the species reaches a graceful twenty-five to thirty-five feet with a rounded, vase-shaped crown. The summer flowers are white, carried in airy terminal panicles that are smaller and more delicate than the heavy trusses of the familiar Lagerstroemia indica.
Few tender shrubs work as hard for as long as the lantanas, and Lantana camara 'Hybrida' distills the whole genus down to a single clear note of yellow. The species belongs to the verbena family, Verbenaceae, and hails from the West Indies and the warm reaches of Mexico south through tropical America, where the plant scrambles along roadsides and clearings in a haze of nectar and butterflies. The genus name is a borrowed one: Renaissance botanists lifted 'Lantana' from an old Latin name for the wayfaring tree, Viburnum lantana, whose domed flower clusters the lantana blooms happen to echo. The epithet camara is murkier, glossed variously as a vaulted chamber or a small boat, the true meaning long since lost to the record.
