The middle storey of the garden, built to last. Large shrubs bridge the gap between the canopy and the ground, giving height, screening, and year-round substance without the scale or wait of a full tree.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, named from the Greek word for willow after their willow-like leaves. Itea oldhamii is a little-known evergreen sweetspire from Taiwan, a compact shrub with an unusual party trick: the juvenile leaves can be holly-like, edged with small teeth, while the mature leaves settle to a smooth, entire margin. In late spring the plant carries racemes of small white flowers over glossy evergreen foliage.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of the wetlands, streambanks, and floodplains of the eastern United States, from New Jersey to Florida and west to Texas. Sometimes called Virginia willow for the shape of the leaves, though the plant is no willow at all, the species is prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and for a fall display of orange, red, and burgundy that rivals far showier shrubs. 'Henry's Garnet' is the selection that made the species a garden staple, free-flowering, with six-inch white racemes and a deep maroon-purple fall color that gives the plant its name.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Longspire' is the selection chosen for its flowers: a form that carries notably long, white racemes, arching sprays of small fragrant blooms that outdo the wild plant for length and presence in early summer.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, their name taken from the Greek word for willow. Itea yunnanensis is the Yunnan sweetspire, an evergreen species from southwestern China, close to the Chinese sweetspire but lower and more spreading, with more leathery, darker green leaves that are somewhat holly-like and toothed on juvenile plants and smooth-edged at maturity. In spring the plant carries slender four-inch racemes of small white flowers.
Some plants arrive at the nursery already wearing a mystery, and this jasmine is one of them. The stock was gathered high on a mountain pass above the White Water River in northwestern Yunnan, at roughly ten thousand feet, in the tumbled country of travertine terraces and snow peaks near Baishuitai that the Naxi people hold sacred. The collector, hedging as any honest collector will, noted only that this was probably a scandent shrub, and that guarded phrase is still the truest thing anyone can say about the plant's habit.
Mountain laurel is the aristocrat of the American heath family (Ericaceae), a broadleaf evergreen native from southern Maine to the Florida panhandle and west toward Indiana and Louisiana, most at home on the acid, rocky slopes of the Appalachians. Linnaeus named the genus Kalmia for his student Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist who botanized the eastern colonies in the 1740s, and the species epithet latifolia means broad-leaved. To gardeners the shrub answers to a whole drawer of common names: calico bush for the patterned flowers, spoonwood for the wood, and simply mountain laurel across most of the range.
'Pristine' is a pure white-flowered mountain laurel, a luminous departure from the pink and rose-flushed forms of the wild species. The selection was discovered in Aiken County, South Carolina by the late Mrs. Ernestine Law and introduced to cultivation by Woodlanders, a distinctive regional expression of one of the most iconic broadleaf evergreens of the eastern United States. Where typical Kalmia latifolia opens blush-toned, 'Pristine' unfurls in clean, brilliant white, a serene presence that reads especially bright planted en masse or set against darker evergreens.
'Willowwood' is a Woodlanders introduction selected from a mountain laurel found growing in Aiken County, South Carolina. What sets this laurel apart at first glance is the foliage: narrow, willow-like leaves that lend the shrub a finer, more linear texture than the broad-leaved wild Kalmia latifolia. In bloom, 'Willowwood' carries pink flowers with distinct banding, gathered in the familiar rounded clusters that make mountain laurel such a valued broadleaf evergreen for woodland gardens.
Lagerstroemia limii is the crepe myrtle almost nobody grows, and that is precisely the reason to seek the plant out. Rare in gardens and known mostly to breeders and botanic collections, this Chinese species trades the familiar look of the summer crepe myrtle for something bolder and stranger: broad, blue-green leaves far larger than those of the common sort, and open, pyramidal panicles of lavender-pink bloom carried through the warm months.
Every so often a plant arrives not from a breeder's bench but from a neighbor's yard, and Lantana camara 'Miss Huff' is one of those happy accidents. The selection was found in cultivation near Athens, Georgia, in the garden of the Miss Huff for whom the plant is named, and introduced to the trade by the former Goodness Grows Nursery. What set this lantana apart was cold tolerance: where most of the tribe sulk and die at the first hard freeze, 'Miss Huff' has proven the hardiest lantana in commerce, with well-established clumps shrugging off brief dips to a few degrees below zero and returning faithfully from the root even in zone 7.
No plant carries a heavier freight of story than Laurus nobilis, the bay laurel of the Mediterranean and the original laurel of the victor's crown. The genus name is simply the classical Latin for the tree, and the epithet nobilis means noble or renowned, a fair description of a plant whose leaves once crowned poets, athletes, and returning generals. The whole vocabulary of achievement still leans on this tree: a baccalaureate, a poet laureate, and the warning not to rest on one's laurels all trace back to the wreath of bay. In Greek myth the laurel was born of unrequited love, when the nymph Daphne, fleeing Apollo, was changed into a laurel tree by her father the river god; ever after the god wore the leaves in her memory, and the tree became sacred to him.
Ligustrum quihoui, the waxyleaf or Quihou privet, saves the family's best trick for last. Where most privets flower in late spring, this species from northern and central China waits until late summer and even early autumn, then covers itself in long, airy panicles of small creamy-white flowers, sweetly and unmistakably fragrant. In a season when the flowering shrubs are mostly finished, that late show is worth a good deal.
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.
Spicebush is the shrub that tells you the ground is good. Early land surveyors in the eastern states used Lindera benzoin as an indicator of rich agricultural soil, and the rule holds in the garden: where spicebush thrives, most things will. The plant is a common understory shrub of moist, rich woods from Ontario to Florida and west to Texas, growing six to twelve feet in a loose rounded mass, often colonial from root sprouts, and every part smells of citrus and pepper when bruised.
Lindera fragrans is an evergreen shrub or small tree carrying glossy, leathery, narrowly lance-shaped leaves that look more like bamboo than like anything in the laurel family, each one marked with three clear veins running the length of the blade. The effect is light and linear where most broadleaf evergreens are heavy, and the foliage alone is worth the space. Growth is upright to around twelve or fifteen feet with a narrow six-foot spread, and the bark is a quiet yellow-brown.
Lindera megaphylla is a plant for the patient collector, a broad-leaved evergreen of real presence and pedigree that reveals itself over seasons rather than days. The species comes from the mist-laden mountain forests of western China, where the shrub grows in dappled light among rhododendrons and ancient oaks. Sir Harold Hillier, the great British plantsman, first shared this rarity with Western gardens in the 1970s from his famous nursery, and even now the Chinese spicebush remains uncommon in cultivation.
Lomatia myricoides is an Australian rarity that has quietly proven itself in the American Southeast, and that combination is the whole appeal. A member of the Proteaceae, the great Southern Hemisphere family of banksias, grevilleas, and the waratah, this evergreen shrub spreads wide and low, clothed in long, narrow, sharply toothed leaves, and carries sprays of creamy-white, spidery flowers in the heat of midsummer, sweetly fragrant at close range.
This Chinese evergreen shrub in the witch hazel family can become almost tree-like with age, reaching fifteen to twenty feet on a layered, wide-spreading frame. The leaves are small, dark green, and slightly rough, held densely enough to read as a solid mass from a distance. In early spring the whole shrub covers itself in white flowers built from narrow filamentous petals, four to a flower, giving the fringed effect that runs through the whole witch hazel family and a light sweet fragrance to go with it. That fringe is where the common name Chinese fringe flower comes from, though the name Chinese fringetree is more properly applied to another plant entirely, Chionanthus retusus.
Loropetalum chinense 'Zhuzhou Fuchsia' is Chinese fringe flower at full volume: deep, wine-purple evergreen foliage set alight in spring by tassels of vivid fuchsia-pink bloom. Each flower is a little spray of narrow, strap-shaped petals, fringe-like and slightly whimsical, clustered thickly along the branches so the whole shrub seems to smoulder pink against purple.
Luma apiculata, the Chilean myrtle, is grown above all for the extraordinary bark: smooth, sinuous trunks in warm cinnamon-orange that peel to reveal cream beneath, a living sculpture that glows in low winter light. An evergreen of the myrtle family, Myrtaceae, the plant hails from the temperate rainforests of Chile and neighboring Argentina, where whole groves, most famously the Bosque de Arrayanes on Lake Nahuel Huapi, are built of these twisting, apricot-barked trunks.
