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.
A small, bright green agave with a clean white stripe down the center of each short, broad, toothed leaf, Agave lophantha 'Splendida' is a compact, clumping selection of a species native to South Texas and Mexico. The variegated rosettes stay neat and low, a jewel-box agave for a trough, a container, or the front of a hot, sunny bed.
The tung oil tree is a handsome medium-sized deciduous tree, broad and spreading, with large heart-shaped to lobed leaves up to ten inches across and showy panicles of white flowers, blushed pink and orange at the throat, that open in spring before or with the new foliage. Few flowering trees of the Deep South make a fuller spring show.
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.
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.
An honest admission to start: we do not know her name. Camellia japonica has been bred and named for the better part of three centuries, the roll of registered cultivars runs well into the thousands, and behind those stand thousands more good selections that were grown, loved, handed over a fence, and quietly parted from their labels along the way. This is one of the latter, a pale-pink japonica of real quality and no surviving paperwork, the kind of plant that turns up in old Southern gardens where someone's grandmother knew exactly what it was and never thought to write it down.
Camellia × williamsii 'Donation' is widely counted among the finest hybrid camellias ever raised, and a long-standing favorite in our own garden. The cross is between Camellia saluenensis and the old japonica 'Donckelaeri', made by Colonel Stephenson Clarke at Borde Hill in England; the williamsii group to which the plant belongs began with J.C. Williams at Caerhays, whose saluenensis crosses gave the genus a new hardiness and an unmatched freedom of bloom. 'Donation' carried that promise furthest, and the Royal Horticultural Society has long honored the plant with an Award of Garden Merit.
Carex flaccosperma, the blue wood sedge, is a clump-forming native of the Southeastern woodlands grown for cool, glaucous, blue to blue-green foliage. The blades are wide for a sedge, to half an inch, faintly quilted along the veins, and they catch the light with a soft powdery sheen that lifts a shaded planting where most greens recede.
A silvery, soft-textured juvenile-foliage form with an unusual and well-documented history. 'Shiva' was originally presumed to be Chamaecyparis thyoides, the Atlantic white cedar, but now appears to be a form of Chamaecyparis pisifera, the sawara cypress of Japan. The plant was found as a seedling on Cape Cod by Rekha Morris of Pendleton, South Carolina, and introduced by Clarence Towe of Walhalla, South Carolina. By all signs this curious form will never become a large tree.
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.
Japanese cedar is a tall, pyramidal to conical evergreen conifer, and the great timber tree of Japan, where the sugi soars past a hundred feet and lines temple avenues and mountain forests alike. The blue-green needles are held close and awl-shaped, taking on a bronzy, purple-bronze cast through cold winters before recovering their color in spring. The reddish-brown bark peels in long fibrous strips down a straight, buttressed trunk.
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.
Dryopteris ×australis is a fern that cannot, strictly speaking, reproduce, and is all the more vigorous for the lack. This is a natural hybrid, thrown wherever two Southern wood ferns grow within a spore’s reach of one another: the log fern, Dryopteris celsa, and the southern wood fern, Dryopteris ludoviciana. The cross comes out sterile, setting spores that never amount to anything, so the fern cannot seed itself across a bed the way a large fern usually will. Every plant in cultivation traces back by division to a wild clump found somewhere between Virginia and Louisiana, the greatest number of them in Alabama.
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.
We are identifying this little-known fig as Ficus heterophylla thanks to Tony Avent of Plant Delights, who was most likely the source of the cuttings we originally started with. The species name means different leaves, and the plant lives up to the promise: juvenile foliage may be lobed and wandering in outline, while the mature leaves settle into dark green, pointed, slightly heart-shaped blades carried on handsome red petioles. A faint sweetness hangs about the shrub, and the long, almost vine-like branches lend the whole plant a loose, scrambling grace.
