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.
Dianella tasmanica 'Variegata' is a strappy evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage: arching, sword-shaped leaves boldly striped in white and green that stay dense and upright through the season and lend crisp, year-round structure to a bed. In spring and early summer, airy panicles of small, star-shaped, blue to violet flowers rise on wiry stems above the leaves, followed by glossy, deep blue berries that gleam against the pale striping, an unusual and long-lasting ornamental touch that gives the plant a second season of interest.
Few garden shrubs carry a resume like Dichroa febrifuga. In the ground this is a handsome, medium evergreen with lacecap heads of small blue flowers in late spring and, better still, clusters of berries in fall that ripen to an almost unreal iridescent, metallic blue, the kind of structural color usually reserved for beetles and tropical birds. A relatively recent introduction from China, the plant sits close enough to Hydrangea, in the family Hydrangeaceae, that the same trick applies: acidic soil deepens the flowers and fruit to true blue, while alkaline ground pushes them toward pink.
The genus name comes from the Greek dichroos, meaning "two-colored," and Dichroa versicolor presses the idea further: bloom color shifts with soil chemistry much the way a hydrangea does, swinging from deep cobalt to soft mauve depending on how much aluminum a plant can draw up. The species epithet versicolor only doubles down on the point, promising a shrub that refuses to settle on a single shade.
Dicliptera suberecta is a member of the acanthus family, Acanthaceae, and hails from the grasslands of Uruguay and Argentina, a heritage that shows in a love of heat, sun, and lean soil. Gardeners know the plant by two names that between them tell the whole story: Uruguayan firecracker plant, for the volley of tubular blooms, and hummingbird plant, for the traffic those blooms draw.
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.
Dryopteris ludoviciana, the southern shield fern, is a bold, glossy evergreen native to the wet woodlands of the American South. The species epithet ludoviciana means "of Louisiana," a nod to the swampy bottomlands, blackwater hammocks, and shaded seeps where the fern grows wild, from Florida west to Texas and north through the Carolinas.
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.
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.
The gold-edged form of silverthorn, and a genuinely useful evergreen for hard places. Leaves are leathery and wavy-margined, three inches or so long, glossy green through the middle with a broad creamy-gold border, and silvered underneath with a dusting of tiny brown scales that catches light when the wind turns them. In October and November the shrub produces small creamy-white bells, apetalous and easy to overlook entirely, which is a joke the plant plays every autumn: the flowers are nearly invisible and the scent is extraordinary, closer to gardenia than to anything else, and strong enough to stop people on a path while they work out where it is coming from. Small reddish-brown drupes follow in spring and are technically edible, though the birds are welcome to them.
