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.
Ilex x koehneana, the Koehne or chestnut-leaf holly, is a bold hybrid between the Asian lusterleaf holly, Ilex latifolia, and the European holly, Ilex aquifolium, combining the big glossy leaf of one parent with the classic red berries and spined margins of the other. 'Hohman' is one of the finest of the group for the South: a large, dense, pyramidal evergreen carrying handsome dark green, serrated leaves and heavy crops of bright red fruit, building to twenty-five feet in time.
The anise trees, genus Illicium, are aromatic broadleaf evergreens of the star-anise family, Schisandraceae, named from the Latin illicium, an allurement, for the scent of their leaves. Illicium floridanum, the Florida anise, is the Southeast's own contribution, a shade-loving evergreen native along shaded streambanks and seepage slopes from the Florida panhandle to Louisiana. 'Halley's Comet' is one of the best selections, a vigorous but compact form with especially dark foliage and a heavy show of velvety, star-shaped flowers in deep wine-red.
The Mexican Illicium is a close relative of the southeastern native Illicium floridanum, and the differences are worth having. The leaves are longer and somewhat more pointed, glossy and aromatic when bruised. The flowers are slightly larger and a deeper red, with the same many-strapped starry outline, and where Florida anise is largely finished by late spring these carry on through summer. The habit is an evergreen small tree or large shrub, ten to twelve feet in time, upright and narrow at four to six feet across, holding good dark foliage the whole year in the shade where the plant belongs.
Among the wild irises of North America, Iris fulva is the one that broke the color rules. Where the family runs to blues, purples, and yellows, the copper iris opens in warm coppery red to burnt orange, a shade no other native iris offers, carried on slender stems in late spring and early summer with a soft, slightly drooping poise. The Latin fulva, meaning tawny or reddish-brown, records that unusual color, and the common names, copper iris and red iris, say the same thing more plainly.
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.
'Bayou Marie' is a compact crape myrtle from the Dixie Series, a group of dwarf selections, chosen by David Chopin of Washington, Pennsylvania and introduced by Hines Nursery in California, in the same series as the purple 'New Orleans'. The flowers are the draw: abundant clusters of crinkled, crepe-textured pink blooms, each petal finished with a darker red to lavender edge that gives the whole shrub a lively, two-toned sparkle through the heat of summer.
An evergreen spicebush is a rare thing, and Lindera akoensis is one of the best. Woodlanders grew this shrub from cuttings taken in the garden of Bobby Green of Green's Nursery in Fairhope, Alabama, shared simply as an evergreen Lindera from Taiwan. The plant matches the botanical description of Lindera akoensis, a species of low mountain woodland in Taiwan, and has proven a handsome, glossy-leaved evergreen for the southern garden.
Few native perennials burn as bright as Lobelia cardinalis, the cardinal flower, whose late-summer spikes of pure, velvety scarlet stop traffic in any garden. The species ranges across much of North America along stream banks, wet meadows, and ditches, and takes the common name from the vivid red of a cardinal's robes. From a low rosette of broad green leaves rises a stiff, unbranched stem hung with tubular flowers built, as luck would have it, precisely to the reach of a hummingbird's bill.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Leo' is the coral honeysuckle at its free-flowering best, a selection of the native red honeysuckle that covers itself in bright red, yellow-throated trumpets over an unusually long season. The tubular flowers pour nectar for ruby-throated hummingbirds, which find the vine as irresistible as gardeners do, and the blue-green leaves, some fused right around the stem, make a cool foil for all that heat.
Malvaviscus arboreus, affectionately known as Turk's cap, has charmed gardeners for generations with vibrant, coiled blooms that never quite open, each red flower staying furled like a little turban, which is exactly how the plant earned its name. A close cousin of the hibiscus in the mallow family, Malvaceae, this tough, subtropical shrub carries a story as rich as the scarlet flowers, and two more common names besides: wax mallow and sleeping hibiscus.
Malvaviscus drummondii is the small Turk's cap, the wild, native cousin of the larger Mexican wax mallow and, for many Southern gardeners, the better plant of the two. A relative of the hibiscus in the mallow family, Malvaceae, this shrubby perennial is native to Texas, the Gulf Coast states, and on south, and grows wild in the dappled shade of woodland edges and stream banks where few other bright flowers will bloom.
This shrubby plant has showy red flowers and leaves that are intermediate between the parent species (which see). A relatively recent Texas introduction by Greg Grant, this should prove a garden worthy plant that is likely to be a bit more cold-hardy than the Malvaviscus arboreus parent. Some consider Malvaviscus drummondii to be a variety of Malvaviscus arboreus but we find them quite different and distinct.
'Jacob Cline' is the beebalm to beat for sheer red, a native perennial that throws big, deep-crimson flowerheads on tall stems through the heart of summer. The whorled, tubular blooms sit atop four to five feet of square, mint-family stems, and they pull in hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies with a persistence few perennials match; in one major trial 'Jacob Cline' was the single best beebalm for hummingbirds.
Oleander, Nerium oleander, is the great sun-loving evergreen of the Mediterranean, grown since antiquity for a long summer of bloom, with dark green, leathery, lance-shaped leaves in whorls of three along long, sparingly branched stems. 'Hardy Red' is one of the cold-tougher selections, carrying showy, lightly fragrant clusters of bright red flowers from late spring well into fall.
The purple firespike answers a quiet complaint of the warm-climate gardener, that the tropical border runs to reds and hot corals and forgets the cooler end of the spectrum. Odontonema callistachyum carries erect spikes of tubular, lavender-to-amethyst flowers at the tip of nearly every branch, each spike lengthening to almost a foot as the buds open in succession from fall into spring. The genus name joins the Greek odous, a tooth, with nema, a thread, for the small toothed filaments within the bloom, while the epithet callistachyum means, simply and accurately, beautiful spike. The leaves are broad, glossy, and faintly fleshy, a lacquered dark green that holds the plant together as a handsome mound even between flushes.
Few plants light a shaded corner the way firespike does. Odontonema strictum raises erect spikes of slender, tubular, scarlet flowers to a foot long from late summer into winter, each spike a torch held above dark, glossy, quilted foliage. The genus name pairs the Greek odous, a tooth, with nema, a thread, for the toothed filaments inside the bloom, and the plant answers to a tangle of common names, firespike, cardinal's guard, and firestick among them, though firespike is the one that sticks.
Oxydendrum arboreum, the sourwood, is one of the loveliest and most distinctive trees of the Eastern American woods, and among the very last to flower each year. The name tells the story twice over: Oxydendrum joins the Greek oxys, sour or sharp, and dendron, tree, while the common name echoes the same tang, for the leaves, twigs, and bark all taste sourly of oxalic acid when chewed. A member of the heath family alongside azaleas, rhododendrons, and blueberries, sourwood stands alone as the sole species in the genus, native to well-drained, acid woodland soils from southern Pennsylvania to the Florida panhandle and west toward Louisiana, most abundant in the lower Appalachians.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
30–50 ft.
Spread
15–25 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
This is the pomegranate grown the old way, for the fruit. Punica granatum is a deciduous Middle Eastern shrub of narrow, glossy leaves and vivid orange-red flowers, followed by the large, leathery-skinned, garnet-seeded fruits for which the plant has been cultivated since antiquity. Woodlanders raised this particular selection from seed of a good fruiting specimen in upstate South Carolina, and the plant may well represent 'Wonderful', the widely grown commercial variety, proven here as a dependable cropper in the southern garden.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, heart support, general wellness, topical applications
Turkey oak earns the name from the leaf, three-lobed and clawed and splayed exactly like the track a wild turkey leaves in sand, which is fitting, because sand is where these trees live. Quercus laevis is the signature oak of the deep sandhills, the droughty white-sand ridges of the longleaf country from the Carolinas to the Gulf, ground so poor and so hot that most trees simply decline the invitation.
Nuttall oak is named for Thomas Nuttall, the restless English-American naturalist who botanized the young United States more thoroughly than almost anyone of his generation. Long known as Quercus nuttallii, the tree now carries the name Quercus texana in most botanical usage, a change that has caused no end of confusion, since the name once belonged to a different oak. Whatever the label, this is a large deciduous red oak of the Southern bottomlands, at home in the floodplain forests of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley.
