Diospyros texana, the Texas persimmon, is a small, tough native tree grown above all for the bark, which peels away in thin flakes to reveal a smooth, mottled patchwork of white, gray, and pink beneath. Intricately and crookedly branched, this is a sculptural little tree, as handsome bare in winter as it is in leaf. A creature of the Texas hill country and northern Mexico, the Texas persimmon shrugs off heat, drought, and lean limestone soil that would defeat softer plants.
The botanical name reads like a compliment: Diospyros joins the Greek dios, divine, to pyros, grain, so the genus translates roughly as "fruit of the gods," a lofty title for a tree that drops sweet, homely orange fruit onto the forest floor each autumn. The common name travels the other direction, plain and American, from the Powhatan word putchamin for a dried fruit, a reminder that Native peoples were drying persimmons into cakes long before the botanists arrived.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
55–60 ft.
Spread
30–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Dirca palustris, the leatherwood, is a quiet native shrub with a hidden trick: branches so supple and tough they can be bent, twisted, even tied in a knot without snapping. That remarkable pliability, born of unusually soft, low-lignin wood, gave rise to the names leatherwood and ropebark, and made the bark a favorite of Native peoples for cordage. A slow, rounded, understory shrub of rich eastern woodlands, leatherwood is seldom offered and quietly prized by those who know it.
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.
The autumn fern, Dryopteris erythrosora, earns the common name backward: the new fronds arrive in spring the color of turning leaves, a warm copper-orange that seems borrowed from October. As those fronds age they deepen through pink and bronze and finally settle into glossy dark green, so the plant carries a hint of autumn even at the height of the growing season.
Oblongleaf twinflower, Dyschoriste oblongifolia, is a low, spreading wildflower of the American Southeast, a member of the acanthus family that carpets the dry pine flatwoods, sandhills, and open savannas of Florida and neighboring states. The common name comes from the habit of carrying the small, funnel-shaped flowers in pairs, twinned in the leaf axils along low stems, while the botanical epithet oblongifolia simply describes the neat, oblong leaves. An older regional name is snakeherb, a tag shared across the genus Dyschoriste.
Some plants are grown for beauty; a few are grown for the story of their survival, and Echinacea tennesseensis, the Tennessee coneflower, is one of the latter. Endemic to a handful of limestone cedar glades around Nashville, the species was once believed extinct, then rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century clinging to those thin, sun-baked soils. The Tennessee coneflower went on to become one of the first plants ever listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and after decades of protection and propagation was formally delisted in 2011, recovered. To grow this coneflower is to keep a small piece of that comeback going.
Paper bush, Edgeworthia chrysantha, spends the growing season as a quiet, blue-green shrub and saves the show for the dead of winter. In late winter and earliest spring, while the branches are still bare, the shrub hangs rounded, downward-facing clusters of small tubular flowers from the tips of every stem, silvery-furred buds opening to warm yellow throats that carry a sweet, daphne-like fragrance across cold air. A cousin of Daphne and the native leatherwood Dirca in the family Thymelaeaceae, paper bush shares the tribe's supple, hard-to-snap branches and honeyed scent.
Anacua, Ehretia anacua, is one of the signature small trees of the south Texas brush country and the lower Rio Grande, a member of the borage family that goes by a small crowd of names. The rough, sandpapery upper surface of the leaves earns the tag sandpaper tree, while old-timers along the border call the tree anacua or, corrupted through generations, knockaway. Evergreen to semi-evergreen depending on the winter, the anacua holds dark green, leathery leaves that feel like fine grit under a thumb.
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.
Rare in cultivation and rarer still in bloom, Emmenopterys henryi is a Chinese tree of the coffee family, Rubiaceae, and a close relative of the native fever tree, Pinckneya. Woodlanders was the first nursery to offer the species in the United States, and one of our own trees was the first to display the showy, pink-bracted flowers in the Western Hemisphere, a small piece of horticultural history rooted in South Carolina soil.
Redvein enkianthus, Enkianthus campanulatus, is a refined deciduous shrub from the cool mountain woodlands of Japan, and the selection 'Rubrum' is the deepest-colored of the clan. In late spring the branches hang with dozens of small, waxy, bell-shaped flowers, but where the plain species opens in cream veined with pink, 'Rubrum' pours out flowers of rich, deep red, nodding in tidy clusters at the tips of each whorl of branches. Close up the bells look almost enameled; from a distance they veil the shrub in a soft red haze.
Heaths and heathers run to dozens of species and hundreds of named forms, and most of them sulk in the heat and humidity of the American South. Erica × darleyensis, a hybrid of two European mountain heaths, Erica erigena and Erica carnea, is one of the happy exceptions, tough and adaptable enough to give Southern gardeners a real chance at a plant most only admire in cooler climates. The renowned plantsman Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, allows that if one wants to grow a heath in the southeastern United States, this hybrid represents a credible starting point.
The loquat, Eriobotrya japonica, is a handsome broadleaved evergreen of the rose family, kin to apples, pears, and hawthorns, grown for the bold foliage and the early, unusual fruit. Native to the warm-temperate hills of central China and cultivated in Japan for more than a thousand years, the loquat has traveled with settlers throughout the mild-winter world, from the Mediterranean to the American South, where old dooryard trees are a familiar sight. The large, leathery leaves, deeply veined and toothed along the edges, give the tree a lush, almost tropical presence year round.
A relic of the old Southern wilds, Erythrina herbacea, the coral bean, is a plant that commands attention, graceful yet defiant, wild yet refined. A legume native across the coastal Southeast, the coral bean shifts habit with the winter: in frost-free zones the plant grows as a woody shrub, branching boldly above the ground, while farther north the top dies down with the first hard freeze, only to rise again from a thick, gnarled rootstock when the heat returns, an emblem of Southern resilience.
The 'De Soto' coral bean is an extremely rare white-flowered form of the familiar southeastern native Erythrina herbacea, whose usual dress is fire-engine scarlet. Where the wild coral bean lights the spring with red, this selection raises the same slender, tubular spires in clean, cool white, a startling and lovely departure that Woodlanders introduced some years ago and is pleased to offer again.
Eucomis comosa 'Sparkling Burgundy' is the pineapple lily dressed for drama, a selection grown as much for the foliage as for the flowers. In spring the broad, strap-shaped leaves emerge a deep, glossy burgundy-red, the richest color of the season, then soften toward bronzed green as summer heat builds, holding a smoky, wine-stained cast that sets the plant apart from any ordinary green pineapple lily.
In the quiet understory of the Eastern woodlands grows a shrub of subtle grace and striking autumn drama: Euonymus americanus, the American strawberry bush, known just as fondly by the folk name hearts-a-bustin'. This native, deciduous to semi-evergreen shrub sends up slender, distinctly green, angular stems clad in opposite, lance-shaped leaves to about three inches long. Through spring and summer the plant keeps to the shade of oak, hickory, and pine, quietly content in fertile, moist, well-drained soil.
This luminous evergreen groundcover came into gardens through Heronswood Nursery, from a collection the plantsman Dan Hinkley made on the slopes above the Wolong Panda Preserve in western China. The long, dark green, sharply pointed leaves are laced with bold silver-white veins, a ghostly netting that gives the cultivar the second half of the name and lifts a shaded corner out of the gloom.
