Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
The limequat was born of catastrophe. After the twin freezes of 1894 and 1895 laid waste to Florida's groves, Walter T. Swingle of the United States Department of Agriculture set out to breed citrus that could shrug off a cold snap, and in 1909 he crossed the sharp little West Indian or Key lime (Citrus aurantifolia) with the round Marumi kumquat (Fortunella japonica). Named and introduced in 1913 alongside a sister seedling called Lakeland, the Eustis limequat stands among the first successful intergeneric citrus hybrids, living proof that two separate genera could be wedded and still bear generous fruit.
Few plants carry a story like the Franklin tree. Collected from the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia by John and William Bartram in the 1760s and named by them for their friend Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia alatamaha was last seen growing wild around 1803 and has never been found in nature since. Every Franklinia alive today, in every garden and arboretum on earth, descends from the seed the Bartrams carried home to Philadelphia. To grow one is to hold a living piece of that lineage.
The gardenia needs no introduction in the South; the scent alone has been stopping people in driveways for generations. What 'Chuck Hayes' adds to that old story is nerve in the cold. The line traces back to the late 1970s and a Virginia Beach nurseryman named Charlie Hayes, who noticed a single-flowered gardenia that had come through a brutal freeze unbothered. He crossed that survivor with a double-flowered plant and handed the seedlings to Dan Milbocker, a horticulturist at the Hampton Roads research station, who grew them out, picked the toughest, and eventually released the plant under Hayes's name. The result is a fully double, classically fragrant gardenia that behaves as a far more delicate shrub has no right to.
Few flowers announce themselves the way white ginger lily does after dark. Through late summer and early fall, the tall leafy stems open dense terminal spikes of pure white flowers, each bloom shaped like a hovering butterfly with a small yellow-green stain at the throat, and each one throwing a rich, sweet perfume that carries across a warm garden in the evening air. The scent is jasmine-deep and unmistakable, the reason the flowers are gathered for perfume and personal adornment across the tropics.
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.
Morella pumila is the dwarf waxmyrtle, a low, native evergreen that keeps everything gardeners love about the common wax myrtle, aromatic foliage, waxy berries, and a tough constitution, and shrinks it all to knee height. Native to the frequently burned pinelands of the southern United States, the plant is an adaptation to that fiery world, staying small and spreading slowly into dense patches and colonies by underground runners.
A true olive for the shade, Olea yunnanensis is the sort of plant that rewards the gardener who reads labels twice. The genus is the olive genus, kin to the ancient Mediterranean fruit tree and to the sweet olives and privets of the same family, yet this species hails from the mountains of Yunnan in southwestern China rather than the sun-baked hills of the Old World. The narrow, leathery, dark green leaves carry an unmistakable Osmanthus cast, glossy above and paler beneath, and build into a dense, rounded evergreen canopy that holds the year.
'Variegatus' brings light to the false holly. The spiny, holly-like evergreen leaves are edged in clean creamy white against a dark green center, so the whole shrub reads as a soft glow at a distance and a crisp, formal pattern up close. The variegation lifts a shaded corner the year round, a quiet luminance that the plain green species cannot offer.
In Japan they call the shrub tobira, short for tobira no ki, the door tree, because the cut branches were hung in the doorway at Setsubun to turn back demons at the threshold of spring. The broken wood smells rank, which was rather the point: bad spirits, like most of us, would rather not walk through a bad smell. The genus name is kinder and more exact, pitta and sporos, pitch and seed, for the resin that coats the black seeds and glues them to whatever bird carries them off.
Podranea ricasoliana, the pink trumpet vine or Port St. John's creeper, is a fast-growing evergreen climber from the warm regions of South Africa, a member of the trumpet-creeper family, Bignoniaceae, prized for showy, trumpet-shaped flowers.
Polygala x dalmaisiana, the sweet pea shrub, is a fast-growing evergreen hybrid of two South African species (P. oppositifolia and P. myrtifolia), grown for a nearly year-round show of orchid-like flowers on an open, informal frame.
The English laurel is a large broadleaf evergreen shrub grown for bold, glossy foliage, spires of small white flowers, and, at times, small cherry-like red-to-black fruits. The species is variable, with a number of cultivated forms, and the plant is native to eastern Europe and Asia Minor.
If any native perennial could be said to hum, the honor would go to Pycnanthemum muticum. From mid to late summer the blunt mountain mint gathers a shimmer of broad, silver-frosted bracts at the top of every stem, and within them open dense heads of tiny pink-to-white flowers that draw an almost comic density of life: bees of every kind, wasps, butterflies, skippers, moths, and flies working the nectar from dawn to dusk. In a three-year Penn State study that monitored eighty-six species, no plant drew a greater number and diversity of pollinators.
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
To see Styrax japonicus properly you have to look up. The leaves ride along the tops of the branches, all turned to the sky, while underneath, in late spring, hang rows of small white bells on slender stalks, so the whole horizontal tier of the tree seems lit from below. Stand beneath one in bloom and the common name explains itself.
This variegated form of Confederate jasmine, or star jasmine, is grown as much for the foliage as the flowers. Each leathery, evergreen leaf is bordered and splashed with creamy white, often flushed pink in cool weather, and the leaves run larger than on most forms of Trachelospermum jasminoides, so the vine reads as a soft, marbled cloud of green and cream on a fence or trellis even out of bloom.
Woodlanders has long been a leader in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the 'Razzlequat' is one of the odder and hardier of the lot. The plant is a cross between the Australian desert lime, Eremocitrus glauca, a tough, drought- and cold-tolerant native of the arid Australian interior, and, most likely, the familiar 'Meyer' lemon. From the desert lime parent come thorny, wiry branches, small narrow gray-green leaves, and a hardiness and drought tolerance rare among citrus; from the lemon come size and flavor.
A cold-hardy citrus with a Woodlanders pedigree. Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids that stand outdoors beyond the usual citrus belt, and the calamandarin is one of the toughest. Likely a hybrid of a mandarin, Citrus reticulata, and a calamondin, the calamandarin blends easy-peeling, tangerine-like fruit with the cold tolerance that calamondin brings to the cross.
