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.
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.
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.
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.
The Florida Azalea is a large growing deciduous azalea. The fragrant flowers very early and typically yellow. The flowers of this clone are a unique coral color. This selection was found some years ago and introduced by Falling Waters Nursery in Chipley, Florida. Florida Azalea blooms here in South Carolina in late March-early April and is one of the best native azaleas for the Deep South. It grows well with irrigation under tall pines where soil is sandy, acidic, and well-drained. It is native to Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama.
'Reagan' is a richly colored selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen in the wild in Florida near the Apalachicola River, the great blackwater river whose ravines shelter some of the Southeast's rarest plants. Where the typical Florida azalea runs to clear gold and orange, this form pairs yellow petals with deep reddish-pink buds and flower tubes, so that from a distance the whole shrub takes on a warm, red-flushed glow uncommon in the species.
'Stonewall Jackson' is one of the Dodd nurseries' celebrated Confederate Series of deciduous native azalea hybrids, introduced by Tom Dodd Jr. and Tom Dodd III of Semmes, Alabama. The plant is a cross between the Exbury azalea 'Hotspur Yellow' and the native Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, uniting the size and substance of the English hybrids with the fragrance and Gulf Coast toughness of the wild Southern species.
This native azalea is a hybrid of two well-loved wild species, the Cumberland azalea, Rhododendron bakeri, of the southern Appalachians, and the swamp azalea, Rhododendron viscosum, of wet woodland edges across the East. From the Cumberland azalea the cross takes warm color and a rounded, ball-shaped truss; from the swamp azalea, whose name viscosum means sticky, for the glandular, clammy surface of the flowers, the hybrid takes adaptability to humid ground and a late season of bloom. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek.
Flame azalea is the showiest of all the native azaleas, and the one that stops hikers in their tracks on the Appalachian balds each June. The large, funnel-shaped flowers open in a fiery range that runs from clear yellow through gold and apricot to blazing orange and scarlet, carried in loose trusses just as the new leaves expand. For all that color the flowers are, unusually, without scent, but nothing about a flame azalea in full bloom feels the lack.
'Dawn at the River' is a fine selection of the native flame azalea, Rhododendron calendulaceum, one of the most spectacular of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the eastern mountains. The species blankets woodland slopes and high mountain balds through the southern Appalachians, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, where the famous flame-colored display draws pilgrims to places like Gregory Bald each June. The species name calendulaceum means resembling Calendula, the marigold, a nod to the vivid orange of the flowers, while the common name flame azalea catches both that fire and the way the upright buds stand like candle flames.
