The strawberry tree is a handsome broadleaf evergreen, a large shrub or small tree hung in fall and early winter with clusters of nodding, urn-shaped, pinkish-white flowers, just as the previous year's fruit ripens to warty, orange-red, strawberry-like globes. Flowers and fruit on the branches at once is the particular charm of Arbutus unedo, and the glossy leaves and shredding cinnamon bark hold interest year round.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, digestive health, heart support
Aronia arbutifolia has grown in the wet woods and pocosins of the eastern United States for a very long time, largely unbothered by the horticultural world's attention. 'Brilliantissima' changed that. Selected for foliage with a deeper gloss and berries of a more saturated, almost lacquered red than the straight species, this is the form that finally made gardeners look twice at a native shrub long overlooked despite centuries of quiet usefulness.
Asimina obovata is the bigflower pawpaw, a Florida native that carries the largest, showiest blooms in a genus better known for its fruit. The pawpaws are the temperate outliers of the Annonaceae, the custard apple family whose tropical members include the cherimoya, soursop, and ylang-ylang, and Asimina alone among them ventures north into the sandy uplands of the American Southeast. The genus name descends from an early Native American word for the fruit, carried into English through the French asiminier, while obovata describes the egg-shaped leaves, broadest above the middle.
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
Three things to know about this camellia. First, the tea-oil camellia is the most economically important non-tea member of the genus. China has cultivated Camellia oleifera for over two thousand three hundred years for the oil pressed from the seeds, a light, sweetish, monounsaturated cooking oil chemically close to olive oil (around eighty percent oleic acid in both), used for cooking, traditional cosmetics, hair tonics, and the historic rust-proofing of Japanese woodworking tools and chef's knives. Tea oil sits with olive, palm, and coconut among the four major woody oil crops on Earth. This is a working tree.
'Rosea' is a pink-flowered form of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, the same species behind every cup of green, black, white, and oolong tea, here carrying soft pink flowers in place of the usual white and a reddish flush through the new foliage. The leaves still make tea, so this is an ornamental and a useful plant at once, a little prettier in flower than the straight species and just as willing in the garden.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
4–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
Carya ovata, the shagbark hickory, is one of the great native trees of the eastern woods, as easy to know by the bark as by the nuts. Mature trunks shed long, gray plates that curl away at the ends and hang loose, giving the tree a genuinely shaggy silhouette against a winter sky. Beneath that ragged coat stands a tall, straight, long-lived hardwood that can shade a landscape for two centuries and more.
Few trees carry as much historical weight as the chestnuts, and Castanea mollissima carries it gracefully. This handsome, wide-spreading Chinese native stepped into the void left by one of the great ecological tragedies of the twentieth century, the near-total collapse of the American chestnut, and has been feeding people, wildlife, and the soil ever since. Come fall, the spiny husks crack open to reveal some of the largest, sweetest chestnuts a gardener can grow.
Castanea pumila, the American chinquapin or Allegheny chinkapin, is a deciduous large shrub or small tree native to the eastern and southeastern United States. Long admired by rural foragers and old-time orchardists, this relatively rare native once flourished across the South, where children filled their pockets with the spiny burrs and the sweet, nutty treasure inside.
Few native trees announce spring like Cercis canadensis, the eastern redbud, whose bare branches flush rosy pink and magenta weeks before the dogwoods open. The small pea-like flowers cluster not just along the twigs but straight from the older branches and even the trunk, a charming trick called cauliflory, and give way to broad, heart-shaped leaves. A small, graceful understory tree of eastern and central North America, redbud belongs in the legume family, kin to peas and beans.
Cinnamomum burmannii is the tree behind most of the cinnamon in an American kitchen, an evergreen of the laurel family whose fragrant inner bark, dried and ground, fills the great majority of the spice jars labeled simply cinnamon. Native to the highlands of Indonesia and across tropical Southeast Asia, this glossy-leaved tree is a cassia cinnamon, close kin to true Ceylon cinnamon, to the camphor tree, and to bay laurel, sassafras, and avocado. The whole plant is aromatic, from the leathery leaves to the spicy bark.
The Ponderosa lemon is grown for spectacle as much as for the kitchen. The fruits are enormous, often two to four pounds each, thick-skinned and gloriously bumpy, hanging like green-gold cannonballs among the glossy leaves. For all the size, the flesh is tart, juicy, and true lemon in flavor, and works in any recipe a regular lemon would, with the novelty of a single fruit that can fill a hand.
The Rangpur is not truly a lime at all, but Indian gardeners have used the fruit as one for more than five hundred years. Citrus x limonia, an old natural hybrid of mandarin and citron, bears small, round, deep orange fruits that look like tangerines and taste fiercely sour, with the aromatic bite that makes a fine lime substitute for cooking, cocktails, and marmalade. In India the fruit goes by surkh nimboo, the red lime, prized for exactly that intense, tart juice.
Among the very first of the citranges, Citrus 'Rusk' dates to 1897, when Walter Swingle crossed a Ruby orange with the tough, cold-hardy trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, in the great effort to breed citrus that could take a freeze. The result is a vigorous, tall-growing, notably hardy tree, evergreen to semi-evergreen, and dense with the distinctive three-parted trifoliate leaves.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the Troyer citrange is a classic of the kind. A cross of the Washington navel orange and the inedible but iron-hardy trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, the Troyer was raised in 1909 under the direction of the great citrus breeder Walter Swingle, and later named for A. M. Troyer of Fairhope, Alabama, where the tree first bore fruit, a nice southern footnote for a hardy citrus.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and U.S. 119 is one of the most refined of the group. A complex USDA hybrid, a citrumelo crossed back with a sweet orange, the tree runs one quarter trifoliate orange, one quarter grapefruit, and one half sweet orange, a pedigree chosen to keep the toughness of the trifoliate while pushing the fruit toward genuine quality.
US-942 began life as a rootstock, bred by the USDA and released in 2010 after years of Florida field trials, a careful cross of the Sunki mandarin and the curious Flying Dragon form of trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata. As a rootstock the record is stellar: compact, productive trees, strong resistance to Phytophthora and tristeza virus, and better tolerance of citrus greening than most, which is why growers across the citrus belt have come to trust the number.
Among the more intriguing fruits in the Woodlanders citrus collection, the Gou Tou sour orange stands apart, not only for rarity but for a rare combination of hardiness, heavy fruiting, and surprisingly pleasant flavor. Widely cultivated in Southeast Asia, Citrus aurantium 'Gou Tou' carries the form of a traditional bitter orange but with a taste that leans toward grapefruit, which makes this one of the most palatable sour oranges a gardener outside the subtropics can grow.
The Yuzuquat is a tri-generic hybrid, a curiosity even among unusual citrus. One parent is the yuzu, itself a cross of Citrus ichangensis and Citrus reticulata; the other is the 'Nagami' kumquat, Fortunella margarita. From that three-way pedigree comes an attractive evergreen citrus that bears sour, juicy, lemon-like fruits about the size of a chicken egg.
Citrus myrtifolia 'Chinotto' is the myrtle-leaf orange, a small, dense, thornless citrus grown as much for beauty as for fruit. The tidy branches carry little pointed leaves like a myrtle's, sweetly fragrant white flowers, and a long-held crop of small, round, bitter oranges. Compact and slow, the chinotto makes an exceptional container or patio plant, an evergreen jewel that flowers and fruits at an easy, manageable size.
