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.
This is a Woodlanders plant in the most literal sense: selected, named, and introduced to the American nursery trade by this nursery, in this town, decades ago. The cultivar now carries our name across the country. One Green World in Oregon, Cistus on Sauvie Island, Greenleaf as a national wholesaler, Wilson Bros in three-gallon, Cloud Mountain Farm in Washington, Dancing Oaks in the Willamette Valley, and dozens of regional nurseries from Louisiana to Idaho all carry the plant. Few cultivars in American horticulture are so permanently tied to a single small nursery in Aiken, South Carolina. To buy here is to buy at the source.
Born of careful hands and watchful eyes at the JC Raulston Arboretum in North Carolina, Calycanthus × raulstonii 'Hartlage Wine' is a sweetshrub of uncommon grace. Richard Hartlage made the cross as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in 1991, pairing the Southern native Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus) with the refined Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis); the seedling first flowered in 1996, and the hybrid name honors J.C. Raulston, the arboretum's late director.
The name means peacock camellia, and the vanity here is all in the foliage. Long, narrow leaves with peculiar fishtailed tips drape from the branches in a pronounced weeping habit, more willow than camellia, more Japanese woodblock print than Southern border. This is not the camellia a grandmother grew.
A camellia with a story we can only half tell. Years ago a plant was dropped at the nursery in Aiken, left for a friend to carry home to Korea. The pickup never came, and the plant stayed; the label, somewhere in the years that followed, was lost. We propagated her anyway, because she was too good to let slip, and because she has the particular bone structure of a real cultivar. Someone, somewhere, named her.
There is a quiet poetry in a camellia's defiance of the cold, a flowering that comes not in spring's abundance but in the leanest stretch of the year. Few cultivars speak that winter sonnet as clearly as Camellia 'Crimson Candles', a hybrid of Camellia reticulata and Camellia fraterna.
Distylium myricoides belongs to the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, an evergreen cousin of the fragrant winter witch-hazels, though the kinship shows in the flowers rather than the leaves. The Piroche form is a distinct, low-slung selection of the species, chosen for a broad, spreading habit and strong horizontal branching that make the plant read more as living groundwork than as an upright shrub.
Erythrina × bidwillii is one of the great show-stoppers among the coral beans, a bold hybrid between the Argentine cockspur coral tree, Erythrina crista-galli, and the southeastern native coral bean, Erythrina herbacea. From that crossing comes a plant with the size and drama of the South American parent and the toughness of the North American one, throwing long spikes of vivid, tubular scarlet flowers through the summer, far larger and more sustained than either parent alone.
Every nursery keeps a few mysteries, and this trailing evergreen euonymus is one of ours: a plant still awaiting a firm name, possibly Euonymus aculeatus, collected by Frank Bell high on Mount Emei (Emeishan) in Sichuan, China. Low and spreading, the stems carry long-pointed, finely toothed leaves about two inches long, glossy and evergreen, on a habit that hugs the ground and wanders steadily outward.
Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite' is winterberry shrunk to garden size and cranked up in intensity. Where much of the landscape fades to gray, this compact native holly turns into a beacon, the bare stems packed with heavy clusters of large, glossy scarlet berries that color in fall and cling deep into winter, a living ember at the pond's edge or against fresh snow.
Ilex 'Sparkleberry' is the aristocrat of the winterberries, a vigorous hybrid holly bred from the native winterberry, Ilex verticillata, and the Japanese winterberry, Ilex serrata, and introduced by the U.S. National Arboretum. The cross brought hybrid vigor and a heavier, longer-holding crop: tall, upright stems that shed their leaves in fall and blaze with bright red fruit, persisting so well that the berries often hang on into spring.
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.
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.
Pistacia chinensis, the Chinese pistache, is a medium-sized deciduous tree and a close relative of the pistachio nut, though this species carries no crop for the table. What the tree offers instead is one of the finest autumn shows in the warm South: lustrous, dark green compound leaves that ignite, nearly all at once, into a fire of scarlet, orange, and red before they fall.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
Smooth sumac is a bold, colony-forming native shrub of the eastern and central United States, in time reaching the scale of a small tree, and one of the finest plants going for a hot, dry, sunny site where little else will thrive. The long, pinnately compound leaves give an almost tropical texture through summer, and the plant spreads by root suckers into broad, picturesque colonies, or can be held to a single tree-like specimen where the suckers are controlled.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun
Height
9–15 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Staghorn sumac is a bold native shrub or small tree of the northeastern United States and Canada, growing fifteen to thirty feet on stout, forking stems clothed in fine velvety hairs, the texture and antler-like branching that give the plant the name. The big, pinnate leaves are bright green through summer and turn a spectacular blend of yellow, orange, and red in fall, one of the great autumn shrubs of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–30 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Rohdea japonica, the sacred lily or Nippon lily, is a bold, slow, tufted evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage, and this selection carries the darkest leaves of all, an almost black, glossy green that anchors a shaded planting through the whole year and lights up a winter landscape when little else holds. Rather sizeable red berries ripen in tight clusters, half-hidden at the base of the leaves, a quiet second season for anyone who looks closely.
Rosa 'Louis Philippe' came into the world in 1834 at Angers, France, raised by the rosarian Modeste Guérin and named for the man then on the throne, Louis Philippe, the Citizen King. His blood was royal in a second sense. Guérin is said to have bred him from 'Slater's Crimson China', one of the handful of repeat-blooming China roses that had reached Europe a generation earlier and overturned everything Western gardeners thought a rose could do. That rose had grown in Empress Joséphine's garden at Malmaison and been painted there by Redouté, and cuttings of its line found their way to Guérin's bench. This was a fashionable, well-connected rose, bound for the gardens of the European elite.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Weigela is a deciduous shrub of rounded habit and opposite oval leaves. This cold-hardy old-fashioned favorite is native to eastern Asia. 'Java Red' is an old variety also known as 'Foliis Purpureis'.
