Turn up the heat. The blazing beauties are the plants that bring fire to the garden, the hot reds, blazing oranges, and molten yellows that carry the sunniest, most exuberant color a border can hold.
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.
The red buckeye is the South's hummingbird herald, a clump-forming, round-topped deciduous shrub or small tree whose lustrous, palmately compound leaves break very early, often before the last frosts, and whose six-inch panicles of tubular scarlet-red flowers open in spring just as the ruby-throated hummingbirds return north. The bright bloom, unusual among the buckeyes, draws hummingbirds and bees in numbers and gives the plant a long place in the affection of native-plant gardeners across the southern United States.
Few spring sights stir the woodland gardener like wild columbine in bloom. Aquilegia canadensis hangs nodding red-and-yellow bells, spurred and lantern-like, over lacy blue-green foliage, catching the low light of April along forest edges, rocky outcrops, and Appalachian coves where the plant has grown for ages. The eastern red columbine, or simply wild columbine, is among the most beloved of native spring wildflowers.
A hybrid strawberry tree, Arbutus x andrachnoides crosses the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, with the Grecian strawberry tree, A. andrachne, and takes the best of both: white, bell-shaped flowers and pink, strawberry-like fruit on a small evergreen tree, over dark green leaves an inch and a half to four inches long. The real prize comes with age, when the bark peels away to a smooth, rich red-brown that rivals any madrone.
Aronia arbutifolia has grown in the wet woods and pocosins of the eastern United States for a very long time, largely unbothered by the horticultural world's attention. 'Brilliantissima' changed that. Selected for foliage with a deeper gloss and berries of a more saturated, almost lacquered red than the straight species, this is the form that finally made gardeners look twice at a native shrub long overlooked despite centuries of quiet usefulness.
Butterfly weed is the orange star of the summer meadow, a strong-growing native perennial of eastern North America and a longtime favorite of gardeners. Flower color ranges from clear yellow to nearly red, but the typical Asclepias tuberosa blazes a vivid orange that butterflies, and the eye, find from across the garden.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
12–24 in.
Spread
12–18 in.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, pain relief, reproductive health
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 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.
Pine-leaved bottlebrush earns the name honestly: the foliage is fine, stiff, and needle-like, closer to a young pine than to the broad leaves of most bottlebrushes, and the whole shrub stands upright and a little spare, which is part of the charm. Native to southeastern Australia, this species is uncommon in cultivation in the southern United States, so growing one is a small act of plant collecting.
An exceptional cold-hardy bottlebrush, Callistemon rigidus 'Clemson' is a compact to medium evergreen shrub hung with brilliant red, brush-like flowers that bloom heavily in late spring and often rebloom through summer. Native to Australia, this selection defies expectations for the genus by thriving outdoors in upstate South Carolina, where winters are usually too cold for bottlebrushes.
Calycanthus floridus 'Michael Lindsey' is the sweetshrub gardeners reach for when fragrance is the whole point. The species, Carolina allspice, is a southeastern native beloved for reddish-brown flowers that smell of ripe fruit, but the scent varies wildly from seedling to seedling, and 'Michael Lindsey' was chosen precisely for a rich, dependable perfume. Add glossy dark green foliage and clear golden fall color, and this selection has become a benchmark, one the plantsman Michael Dirr called the standard by which other introductions will be measured.
The United States National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. sits on 446 acres of rolling ground above the Anacostia River, a place where serious horticultural work has gone on quietly for the better part of a century. Camellia japonica 'Anacostia' takes both the name and the pedigree from that institution, selected at the Arboretum for cold hardiness and reliable performance at the northern edge of camellia country.
'Tama no ura' is among the most celebrated of all wild-found camellias, and the story is part of the plant. In 1947 a charcoal worker came upon a single old Camellia japonica, by repute some two hundred years old, growing deep in the forest near Tamanoura on Fukue Island in the Goto archipelago, off Nagasaki. The flowers stopped him: single, bright red, and edged crisply in white, a clean picotee never before recorded in the wild. Selected and propagated from that one tree, the camellia was exhibited in Nagasaki in 1973 and carried to America by Nuccio's Nursery in 1975.
Clinopodium coccineum is a small, aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family, native to the deep, well-drained sands of the southeastern coastal plain, from Mississippi and Georgia down into Florida. The loose, open frame and small, spicy-scented leaves would earn a quiet place on their own, but the flowers are the event: showy scarlet tubes carried over a long summer season, held out like little trumpets that hummingbirds cannot resist.
Colquhounia coccinea is a showy, soft-wooded shrub of the mint family, clothed in medium-sized leaves that are downy and pleasantly rough to the touch. Through late summer and fall come dense terminal spikes of orange-scarlet, yellow-throated flowers, a hot late-season color that hummingbirds and pollinating insects work eagerly. Plant in a sunny, well-drained site with good soil, where the arching stems can be trained against a warm wall.
Crocosmia 'Lucifer' is a vigorous, corm-forming perennial and one of the best summer plants for the southern garden, multiplying steadily in good, moist, neutral to acid soil in sun or light shade. Tall, arching spikes of brilliant red-orange, flame-colored flowers rise over the clump through early to midsummer, held above fans of pleated, sword-like green leaves.
Once thought lost to time and development, Cyrilla arida, known as Scrub Titi, is a botanical rarity with a story as striking as the summer bloom. The famed botanist J.K. Small first described this shrub in the early twentieth century from the desert-like scrub of central Florida. For decades the identity of Scrub Titi was debated and any wild presence uncertain, until a dedicated search led to rediscovery by Kenneth Wurdack and the Woodlanders team in Highlands County, Florida. That tiny remnant population may now be gone, and Cyrilla arida may no longer exist in the wild, which makes every plant in cultivation all the more precious.
Few plants carry their history as plainly as Danae racemosa. The name reaches back to Greek myth, to Danae, daughter of the king of Argos, and the foliage carries a heavier classical freight than almost anything else you can grow in shade: Roman poet laureates are said to have worn the sprays as their wreath, and Alexander the Great may have taken his victory crowns from the same hills where he was fighting. Hence the two common names that have followed the plant for centuries, poet's laurel and Alexandrian laurel. Danae is, for the record, no true laurel at all.
Dicliptera suberecta is a member of the acanthus family, Acanthaceae, and hails from the grasslands of Uruguay and Argentina, a heritage that shows in a love of heat, sun, and lean soil. Gardeners know the plant by two names that between them tell the whole story: Uruguayan firecracker plant, for the volley of tubular blooms, and hummingbird plant, for the traffic those blooms draw.
