Two things the common names get wrong: it is not Chinese, and it is not a maple. Abutilon pictum comes from the warm river country of southern Brazil and its neighbors, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the maple lives only in the leaves, which are lobed and toothed enough to have fooled people into "flowering maple." It belongs instead to the mallow family, in good company with hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and it carries that resemblance in every five-petaled bloom.
In July, when most of the shade garden has settled into a holding pattern of foliage and waiting, Aesculus parviflora opens for business. The timing is the first surprise. The flowers are the second. Each panicle is a foot or more of tightly packed white tubular blooms with conspicuous pink-red anthers projecting beyond the petals, the whole spike held upright above the foliage like something assembled by a botanical committee that could not decide between elegant and extravagant and chose both. A mature colony in full bloom in midsummer is among the more spectacular events available to the shade gardener, and the hummingbirds and swallowtails arrive reliably.
The genus name says it: Callicarpa, from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, beautiful fruit, a genus named for exactly what it does. Callicarpa americana, the American beautyberry, is the southeastern native that gives the genus a calling card. From late August into November, the plant sets dense clusters of small drupes in a luminous magenta-purple, a color that registers as almost unreal in the late-summer landscape, somewhere between fuchsia and amethyst, with no real precedent among native fruits. The berries gather in tight whorls around the stem at every leaf node, all the way down the arching branches, so that a mature shrub in October looks less like a shrub bearing fruit than a ribbon of purple glass beads strung along the branches.
Hardiness
Zones 7–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, immune support
Everyone who grows the native beautyberry knows the plant by the autumn display: those improbable whorls of magenta-purple fruit circling every stem like something a florist arranged and forgot to bill for. 'Welch's Pink' is that plant, in a color the species was not supposed to have.
The white-fruited form of the Asian beautyberry, Callicarpa dichotoma 'Albifructus' is a quiet pleasure of the late-summer border: instead of the usual magenta, the arching stems hang with luminous, ivory-white berries in elegant clusters, cool and refined where the purple kinds are bold. Native to eastern Asia, in Korea, China, and Japan, the white beautyberry is smaller and more graceful than the American species, and all the more striking for the restraint.
This is a tree you harvest from a boat. Crataegus opaca, the western mayhaw, grows wild in the flooded bottoms of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the cypress sloughs and pond margins of east Texas, Louisiana, and the Deep South, and when their fruit ripens in late spring it drops straight into the water and floats. For generations Southern families went out in May with boats, nets, and scoops to gather the bobbing red haws off the surface, a fast three weeks of work that turned into a year's worth of jelly. The name says as much: mayhaw, for the month, and haw, the old word for hawthorn.
Dendropanax trifidus is one of those quiet, aristocratic evergreens that rewards a second look and then a third. To the casual eye the plant reads as a glossy, tropical-looking small tree, something you would expect to sulk at the first frost; in truth this is a tough, warm-temperate native of the coastal forests of southern Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, hardy well into the Southeast and unbothered by heat, humidity, or a mild winter.
Distylium myricoides belongs to the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, an evergreen cousin of the fragrant winter witch-hazels, though the kinship shows in the flowers rather than the leaves. The Piroche form is a distinct, low-slung selection of the species, chosen for a broad, spreading habit and strong horizontal branching that make the plant read more as living groundwork than as an upright shrub.
Golden dewdrop, Duranta erecta, is a member of the verbena family grown across the warm world for two ornaments the shrub carries at once: loose, drooping sprays of soft lilac-blue flowers, each with a darker eye, and long chains of round, glossy amber berries that hang like strings of wet gold. The common name catches that second gift exactly, while older names, pigeon berry and skyflower, catch the first. Native from Mexico and the Caribbean through much of tropical South America, the shrub has been carried into gardens throughout the subtropics, where the plant flowers and fruits nearly year round.
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.
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.
Hibiscus dasycalyx is one of the rarest wildflowers in the country, described only in 1968, and even then from a mere handful of sites in the bottomlands of east Texas, in Houston, Trinity, and Cherokee counties, along the Neches, Angelina, and Trinity rivers. The total wild population has been estimated in the low thousands. Whole seasons of botanical fieldwork across the Southeast have turned up fewer plants than a single good nursery bed.
'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.
Hypericum nudiflorum is the early riser among the St. John's Worts, a slender, upright shrub that opens golden flowers as early as May, often a full month ahead of relatives. The blooms carry the many-stamened brush typical of the clan, set against broad, light green, oval leaves that give the plant a softer, leafier look than the needle-leaved species.
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.
By late summer, when many shrubs have said their piece, Lespedeza thunbergii 'Spring Grove' is only clearing its throat. The many woody, arching stems bend into a green fountain through the season, then bow lower still under a long, generous fall of rose-purple pea flowers carried in racemes six to eight inches long. 'Spring Grove' is a newer selection said to hold darker purple flowers and a tidier, better habit than the old standard 'Gibraltar', and the photographs here come courtesy of the JC Raulston Arboretum.
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.
The purple firespike answers a quiet complaint of the warm-climate gardener, that the tropical border runs to reds and hot corals and forgets the cooler end of the spectrum. Odontonema callistachyum carries erect spikes of tubular, lavender-to-amethyst flowers at the tip of nearly every branch, each spike lengthening to almost a foot as the buds open in succession from fall into spring. The genus name joins the Greek odous, a tooth, with nema, a thread, for the small toothed filaments within the bloom, while the epithet callistachyum means, simply and accurately, beautiful spike. The leaves are broad, glossy, and faintly fleshy, a lacquered dark green that holds the plant together as a handsome mound even between flushes.
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.
