The plants that come back. Herbaceous perennials rise from the crown each spring, flower through the warm months, and retreat to the ground in winter, returning larger the year after. They are the flowering heart of the border, the long-term investment that repays a gardener season after season.
Cuban rose mallow is one of the tall, slender members of the perennial hibiscus tribe, a plant that reads as airy and upright rather than bushy. Through the summer the stems carry fairly large flowers in a soft purplish pink, the classic mallow saucer set against distinctly gray-green foliage, and the stems themselves are lightly prickly to the touch. Rising to seven or ten feet on narrow clumps, the plant lifts the bloom well up where the color can be seen from a distance.
Hibiscus grandiflorus, the swamp rose mallow, is a magnificent native perennial of the southeastern United States, grown for enormous soft-pink blooms and broad, velvety, gray-green leaves. Rising to eight or ten feet on stout stems, the plant brings a lush, almost tropical presence to the summer garden, at home in a wetland but just as striking in an ordinary bed or beside a pond.
Hibiscus moscheutos, the rose mallow, is the hardiest of the perennial hibiscus and the tough, cold-proof parent behind most of the dinner-plate hibiscus sold today. The wild plant is a stout, clump-forming perennial of eastern marshes, rising to six or eight feet each summer and opening broad flowers to six inches and more, clean white or soft pink with a dramatic crimson eye at the center. For sheer size of bloom on a plant that shrugs off hard winters, little else compares.
Hibiscus palustris is the northern, cold-hardy face of the American rose-mallows, a marsh dweller whose species name comes straight from the Latin palus, a swamp or marsh. Botanists today often fold the plant into Hibiscus moscheutos as a subspecies, but the old name still travels with the pink-flowered marsh plants of the Northeast, and gardeners know exactly which plant the name marks. Where many tropical hibiscus sulk at the first frost, this perennial dies cleanly to the ground each winter and returns from a woody crown, unfazed by zone 5 cold.
'Peppermint Flare' comes with a well-documented pedigree, which is rare for a hardy hibiscus. The plant arose as a sport, a spontaneous mutation, of the hibiscus 'Flare', a nearly sterile rose-mallow hybrid bred by Dr. Sam McFadden and released through the University of Florida. The Texas horticulturist Greg Grant spotted and selected the peppermint-striped form, and in 2010 the plant was named a Texas Superstar, the designation reserved for tough, proven performers in the Southern heat.
Hosta 'Tardiflora' announces the best trait in the name itself: tardiflora means late-flowering, and this small Japanese hosta is very nearly the last of the tribe to bloom, lifting lavender flowers in fall when most hostas have already finished and begun to tire. The plant traces back to the wild Hosta longipes, the long-stalked giboshi of Japan's rocky mountain slopes, where the species clings to cliffs and streambanks; 'Tardiflora' is a distinct, late seedling form long grown as a garden plant in its own right.
Hosta yingeri is one of the more recent hostas to reach gardens and one of the most distinct, a species found only on a scatter of rocky islands in the Huksan Archipelago off the southwestern coast of Korea. The American plantsman Barry Yinger collected the plant on Taehuksan Island in 1985, and the botanist Samuel B. Jones formally named the species in 1989 in Yinger's honor. For a genus most gardeners associate with the woodlands of Japan, this Korean islander broadened the family map.
Iris brevicaulis is the low, quiet member of a famous clan. One of the five wild species known collectively as the Louisiana irises, the plant carries broad blue to violet flowers on curiously kinked, zigzagging stems, so short that the blooms rarely clear the fan of sword-shaped leaves. Botanists call that back-and-forth habit fractiflex, and the trait gives the plant one of the common names, zigzag iris; the Latin brevicaulis, short-stemmed, records the same feature, while a third name, Lamance iris, honors the American horticulturist Lora La Mance.
Iris cristata is the iris scaled down for the woodland floor, a dwarf native barely six inches high that spreads into low, overlapping fans of bright green blades. In mid to late spring the mats light up with small flowers, an inch and a half to two inches across, in soft lavender-blue to violet, each fall stamped with a white patch and a raised orange or yellow ridge. That ridge is the crest that gives the plant both the Latin name cristata, crested, and the common name crested iris, and the feature sets the species apart from the bearded and beardless irises alike.
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.
The horticulturist Scott Ogden, in Garden Bulbs for the South, sets the scene: the Japanese roof iris, Iris tectorum, is famous in the native country as a flower for planting on sod roofs, just as houseleeks are used on the cottage roofs of France. In gardens the silky green fans of leaves form large patches, a fine subject for the foreground of a shady border, and in April the ruffled, orchid-like blooms appear among the handsome leaves. In the common form these are a rich mottled blue with white crests; even lovelier, Ogden adds, are the white, yellow-crested blooms of the form offered here.
The horticulturist Scott Ogden, in Garden Bulbs for the South, sets the scene: the Japanese roof iris, Iris tectorum, is famous in the native country as a flower for planting on sod roofs, just as houseleeks are used on the cottage roofs of France. In gardens the silky green fans of leaves form large patches, a fine subject for the foreground of a shady border, and in April the ruffled, orchid-like blooms appear among the handsome leaves. This is the common form, in which the flowers open a rich mottled blue, veined and freckled toward the center, with white crests.
Iris verna is one of those plants that feels like a secret, small, fragrant, and impossibly charming once noticed. Native to the pinewoods and sandy slopes of the eastern United States, this understated iris has been a spring companion for centuries, brightening forest floors long before gardeners thought to give the plant a place at home.
Seashore mallow is an erect, branching herbaceous perennial of the cotton family (Malvaceae), the same clan as hibiscus, hollyhock, and cotton, and the kinship shows in the flowers. Native to the brackish and salt marshes of the eastern United States, from New York and Delaware south to Florida and Texas, the species carries hibiscus-like blooms from midsummer well into fall, each a clear five-petaled cup around a central column of fused stamens. This selection, 'Alba', trades the usual soft pink for pure, clean white.
Few late-summer plants command a border like Leonotis leonurus, the lion's ear of the South African veld. Tall square stems, the signature of the mint family, Lamiaceae, rise five feet and more before breaking into tier upon tier of burnt-orange flowers, each whorl circling the stem like a ruff. The velvety, curved tubes are the source of both common names, lion's ear and lion's tail, and the botany agrees: Leonotis comes from the Greek for lion's ear, and leonurus for lion's tail.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
2–4 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, topical applications, general wellness
Liatris spicata, the blazing star or gayfeather, sends up rockets of feathery purple in the heart of summer, one of the great vertical accents of the North American prairie. The species is native to the moist meadows, prairies, and wet savannas of eastern North America, where the flower spikes once rose in their thousands among the tall grasses. Set against those horizontal sweeps of grass, the erect, bottlebrush spikes give any planting a jolt of structure and color.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
immune support, respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, digestive health
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.
Where the cardinal flower runs to scarlet, Lobelia siphilitica answers in blue. The great blue lobelia sends up leafy spikes packed with inch-long, two-lipped flowers of clear, saturated blue in late summer and early fall, one of the truest blues in the native flora and a gift to the garden at a tired time of year. The species grows wild across eastern and central North America in moist meadows, low woods, and along streamsides.
Monarda fistulosa, wild bergamot, is one of the great native perennials of the North American prairie, a hardy, aromatic member of the mint family loved for showy heads of lavender-pink and for a fragrance like oregano crossed with mint. The species grows wild in meadows, prairies, and open woods across most of the continent, and brings both vivid summer color and a deep well of history to the garden.
Sundrops make a gentle joke of their family. Oenothera fruticosa ssp. glauca belongs to the evening primroses, a tribe famous for opening at dusk and closing by mid-morning, yet the sundrops break ranks and bloom by day, holding cups of clear, satiny yellow wide open through the sunlit hours of late spring and early summer. The genus name comes from the Greek oinos, wine, and thera, to hunt or seek, an old and disputed reference to a European relative whose roots were once thought to give a taste for wine; the epithet fruticosa means shrubby, for the firm, upright stems, and glauca notes the blue-green bloom on the foliage.
