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.
Myrica rubra, the Chinese bayberry or yangmei, is a fruiting evergreen tree from the misty mountains of East Asia, revered for centuries across China and Japan for tangy-sweet berries and an elegant, shapely form. Imagine cherries and cranberries with a botanical lovechild that had the moodiness of a plum and the antioxidant punch of a superfruit, and something close to yangmei would be the result. The current stock is female, tissue-cultured clones of a named selection.
Heavenly bamboo, Nandina domestica, has been a fixture of Southern gardens for generations, though the plant is no kin to bamboo at all, but a member of the barberry family from East Asia. The likeness is in the look: erect, sparingly branched canes carry large, glossy, fern-like compound leaves that flush red and bronze in cold weather, and the whole plant reads light and airy where a solid evergreen would feel heavy. 'Leucocarpa' is an uncommon selection that trades the usual scarlet berries for creamy pale-yellow ones, otherwise much like the familiar form.
Oleander, Nerium oleander, is a large, sun-loving evergreen shrub of the Mediterranean, grown since antiquity for a long, generous summer of bloom. Dark green, leathery, lance-shaped leaves ride in whorls of three along the long, sparingly branched stems, and from late spring well into fall the branch tips carry showy, lightly fragrant flower clusters. 'Double Pink' bears fully double, rose-like flowers in a soft, warm pink.
The hardiest yellow oleander in cultivation, and one of the very few oleanders that come in yellow at all. Of the four hundred and more named cultivars of Nerium oleander, the genus runs naturally to white, pink, and red; yellow is the aberration, and a fully double yellow rarer still. 'Double Yellow' is the old French selection that fixed the color.
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
Passiflora 'Incense' is a passionflower bred for pure spectacle, an extraordinary cross between the native maypop, Passiflora incarnata, and the South American Passiflora cincinnata. The hybrid gathers the toughness of the native parent and the drama of the exotic one into a single deep-violet flower four to five inches across, the wavy corona filaments frilled and banded in purple and white, carrying a sweet, incense-like fragrance that gives the plant its name.
Passiflora 'Amethyst' is one of the most rewarding of the ornamental passionflowers, a vigorous hybrid grown for large, jewel-toned blooms of glowing red-purple. Each flower opens nearly flat, three to four inches across, the petals and sepals reflexing back to set off a short, banded corona and a lifted central column of stamens and styles. The parentage is somewhat uncertain, as with many old garden passionflowers, but the effect is unmistakable: an amethyst star held out along the vine.
Patrinia scabiosifolia 'Nagoya' is a tough, upright perennial from the meadows and grassy hills of East Asia, grown for airy, flat-topped heads of tiny golden-yellow flowers held high on wiry, branching stems. The species name scabiosifolia points to the deeply lobed basal leaves, which recall those of a scabious, and the whole plant reads as a chartreuse-gold answer to Queen Anne's lace, lending height and a see-through veil to a summer border. In Japan the species is one of the classic seven flowers of autumn, and 'Nagoya' is a garden selection prized for reliable, compact performance.
'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.
Pinus patula is the weeping pine, and few conifers wear their needles so gracefully. Long, slender, and soft, the bright grass-green needles hang straight down from the branches in feathery curtains, so that the whole tree seems to pour toward the ground, especially in a light breeze. Fast-growing and open-crowned, this is a Mexican pine grown above all for that pendent, shimmering foliage.
Pithecoctenium cynanchoides, the monkey's comb, is a vigorous, tendril-climbing vine of the trumpet-creeper family, Bignoniaceae, native to the warm woodlands and thickets of South America. Semi-evergreen in mild climates, the vine climbs by many-branched tendrils and clothes a support quickly in heart-shaped, three-parted leaves, the terminal leaflet often turned into a grasping tendril of its own.
Pleioblastus distichus 'Mini' is the smallest of the running bamboos, a fine-textured dwarf that behaves more like a groundcover than a grove. The tiny, glossy leaves line up in flat, two-ranked sprays, fern-like and neat, on threadlike stems only eight or ten inches high, building a dense green carpet that can be mowed or edged like a lawn.
The procimequat is a rare and fascinating citrus hybrid, born from a botanical marriage of the Eustis limequat (itself a cross of kumquat and lime) and the Hong Kong kumquat (Fortunella hindsii). The result is a precocious, compact plant that combines the zesty lime tang of the limequat parent with the tiny, ornamental charm of the wild kumquats, all on a frame small enough for a patio pot.
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.
