The genus honors John Fothergill, the London physician and Quaker whose garden at Upton held one of the great collections of American plants in the eighteenth century, and who paid for William Bartram's four years of travel through the Southeast. The species name of the dwarf witch alder honors Alexander Garden of Charleston. Two names on one small shrub, and both belong to the same network of correspondents who were sending Southeastern plants to England before the Revolution.

What the plants do is simple and very good. White bottlebrush flowers open before the leaves in early spring, honey-scented and full of bees; the summer foliage is clean blue-green, and 'Blue Mist' is decidedly blue; and the fall color is the best argument of all, yellow through orange to scarlet, often all three on a single leaf. Fothergilla gardenii stays low and suckers gently, Fothergilla major reaches head height, and the intermediate hybrids 'Mt. Airy' and 'Sea Spray' split the difference. Give them acid soil, moisture, and sun for the strongest color.