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.
Summersweet, Clethra alnifolia, is one of the great fragrant natives of the eastern United States, a shrub of moist woods and pond edges whose white summer spikes carry a honey-and-clove perfume across the whole garden. Colonists called the plant Sweet Pepperbush, for the peppercorn-like seed heads that follow, and Summersweet, for the scent; the flowers even lather softly in water and once served as a field soap.
The Japanese clethra is grown for bark as much as bloom. Clethra barbinervis is a tall, tree-like deciduous shrub or small tree from the mountains of Japan and Korea, carrying somewhat fragrant terminal racemes of white flowers in summer, in the same sweet-scented family as the native summersweets. But the real distinction is the bark: smooth and polished, gray to warm brown, and exfoliating in age to a handsome patchwork that makes this one of the finest small trees for the winter garden.
Most of the summersweets drop their leaves and sleep through winter; Clethra pringlei keeps them. This Mexican member of the clan is a broad-leaved evergreen, a large, slow-growing shrub or small tree from the mountain woodlands of northeastern Mexico, and one of the more surprising plants in the genus for a gardener who knows only the deciduous American kinds.
Clethra alnifolia and the southern Clethra tomentosa are stoloniferous deciduous shrubs commonly called Summersweet or Sweet Pepperbush. They form colonies in moist acid soil and make good garden subjects. They are valued for their terminal spikes of fragrant white flowers in summer. Plant in sun or semi-shade and provide adequate moisture. This clone of the southern species has light colored backs of leaves and amazing flower racemes up to 16 inches long! This Woodlanders introduction is a plant we selected from the wild in the Florida Panhandle. It was the highest rated Clethra clone tested in trials at Longwood Gardens. Clethra tomentosa is native to the southern U.S.
The summersweets are among the most fragrant of American shrubs, and the southern woolly summersweet, Clethra tomentosa, carries the whole tribe's gifts: colonies of upright stems in moist, acid ground, and terminal spikes of white flowers that pour a honey-and-clove perfume across the July garden. Country people knew the plant as Sweet Pepperbush, for the peppercorn seed heads, and the crushed flowers even raise a soft lather once used as a woodland soap.
Cleyera japonica was for generations placed in the tea family, the Theaceae, alongside camellia and tea themselves, and the resemblance still reads in the glossy, leathery, deep green leaves. Later molecular study moved the genus out of that family and into the Pentaphylacaceae, so the old tea-family listing has since been dropped, though the kinship of appearance remains. In the plant's native Japan the species carries a sacred weight few garden shrubs can claim: this is the sakaki, written with a character that fuses the signs for tree and for god, and the branches are cut for tamagushi, the leafy wands offered at Shinto shrines for blessing and purification. Small, sweetly scented cream flowers open in early summer, followed by berries that ripen from red to black.
Cliftonia monophylla 'Berry Pink' is a rare, pink-flowered selection of the Black Titi, a native evergreen shrub or small tree of the southeastern coastal plain that normally blooms in white. The species haunts the acid bogs, pond margins, and titi swamps from the Carolinas to the Gulf, where the early flowers make the buckwheat tree one of the first and most important nectar sources of the southern year, the source of the prized titi honey.
The American smoketree, Cotinus obovatus, is an uncommon small to medium native tree, kin to the familiar European smoketree but bolder in leaf and rarer in gardens. The common name comes from the fruiting stage, when the loose, fuzzy flower panicles blur the whole crown into a soft haze of smoke. The broad, oval, blue-green leaves are noticeably larger than those of the European Cotinus coggygria, and they close the year in a spectacular blaze of orange, yellow, and red-purple, some of the finest fall color of any native tree.
Titi is one of the quiet workhorses of the southern wetland, an evergreen to semi-evergreen shrub or small tree that ranges farther than almost any other native of the region, from the coastal plain of southern Virginia down through Florida and west to eastern Texas. In the wild the plant haunts the edges of swamps, bays, and blackwater streams, standing in the wet, acid ground where few woody plants thrive, yet takes with surprising ease to ordinary garden soil.
Daphniphyllum calycinum is a bold evergreen shrub that looks, at a glance, like a rhododendron, though the two are unrelated. Handsome, leathery, oval leaves cluster toward the branch tips, deep green above and glaucous, almost bluish-white beneath, giving the plant an exotic, architectural presence in the shade garden. Grown almost entirely for that striking foliage, this is a shrub for the collector rather than the crowd, and one virtually unknown in North American gardens.
Distylium myricoides is an evergreen member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, and a quiet cousin to the fragrant winter witch-hazels, though the family resemblance hides in the flowers rather than the leaves. The genus name comes from the Greek for "two styles," for the paired styles at the heart of each small bloom, while the species epithet myricoides means "resembling Myrica," the bayberries, a nod to the narrow, leathery foliage.
Distylium racemosum is the type species of the genus and the most tree-like of the isu trees, an evergreen member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae. The genus name comes from the Greek for "two styles," for the paired styles at the center of each small flower, while the species epithet racemosum notes the short racemes along which those flowers are held.
Elliottia racemosa, the Georgia plume, is one of the rarest and most coveted of all southeastern native plants, a deciduous shrub or small tree that lifts great feathery plumes of white flowers in the heat of summer. First found by the naturalist William Bartram in 1775 and named for the botanist Stephen Elliott, this member of the heath family grows wild in only a scattering of Georgia localities and almost nowhere else on earth. To grow one is to hold a genuine botanical treasure.
In the forests of the Himalayan foothills and across monsoon Asia grows a fig of ancient bearing, Ficus roxburghii, known to botanists today as Ficus auriculata and to gardeners as the elephant-ear fig. This is no dainty exotic. In the tropics the plant makes a bold small tree; in the American South, where hard frost cuts back the top, the fig returns from the root each year as a heroic perennial, with a presence as memorable as a live oak draped in Spanish moss.
Swamp privet, Forestiera acuminata, is a native deciduous shrub or small tree of the wet South, at home in the flood-prone bottoms and streambanks from Texas east to South Carolina and up the Mississippi Valley as far as Illinois and Indiana. A member of the olive family, Oleaceae, and a distant cousin of the true privets, the plant shrugs off standing water and seasonal flooding with an ease few woody plants can match.
'Sea Spray' has long traveled under the name Fothergilla major, a tidy assumption the botanists have since complicated. Run through a flow cytometer, the plant turns out to be a hybrid, F. × intermedia, the meeting of mountain witch-alder (F. major) and the dwarf coastal F. gardenii, the little shrub Charleston's Alexander Garden sent across to England in the 1760s, in a genus already named for John Fothergill, the London physician who tried to grow half of America in a single garden. All of which makes the name, for once, honest. Most Sea Spray christenings are wishful; this one actually carries the coast in the blood.
The native fothergillas were choice but scarcely available garden shrubs when Woodlanders first began to offer them back in 1980. This one, a hybrid of Fothergilla gardenii and F. major, was found by Dr. Michael Dirr at the Mt. Airy Arboretum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has since become the most widely grown fothergilla of all, and deservedly so.
Some plants elevate the familiar into the extraordinary, and Gordonia lasianthus 'Variegata' does exactly that, taking the quiet majesty of the native loblolly bay and dressing it in a silken fringe of cream. The glossy green leaves are edged in irregular strokes of ivory, as though touched by the brush of some moonlit painter in the pine woods, and the whole shrub glimmers softly through every season.
Grevillea 'Canberra Gem' is a bold and unusual Australian evergreen, a hybrid of Grevillea juniperina and Grevillea rosmarinifolia that brings fine texture, vivid color, and a touch of the exotic to an adventurous garden. The narrow, needle-like foliage is often mistaken for a conifer, until late winter, when the shrub reveals a true identity in a profusion of rose-red, spider-like flowers that spill from the branches and catch the eye clear across the garden.
