Cuban rose mallow is one of the tall, slender members of the perennial hibiscus tribe, a plant that reads as airy and upright rather than bushy. Through the summer the stems carry fairly large flowers in a soft purplish pink, the classic mallow saucer set against distinctly gray-green foliage, and the stems themselves are lightly prickly to the touch. Rising to seven or ten feet on narrow clumps, the plant lifts the bloom well up where the color can be seen from a distance.
Hypericum lissophloeus is the tree among the St. John's Worts, a graceful evergreen that climbs to ten feet or more on slender trunks dressed in smooth, copper-colored bark that peels in thin sheets. The leaves are needle-fine and deep green, so that from a distance the plant reads almost like a small conifer until summer, when small bright yellow flowers scatter along the stems and settle the question of family.
Ilex glabra f. leucocarpa is the white-berried surprise among the inkberries, a native evergreen holly that trades the usual near-black fruit for berries of clean ivory white. On the ordinary inkberry the dark berries all but vanish against the deep green leaves, but here the pale fruit stands out cleanly and holds on the branches from fall right through to spring, a quiet, unexpected show in the winter garden.
Ilex paraguariensis is the holly behind maté, the caffeine-rich tea poured from a gourd and sipped through a metal straw across Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. As a plant, yerba maté is a broadleaf evergreen holly, a shrub or small tree with dark, leathery, serrated leaves, closely resembling the native dahoon holly, Ilex cassine, of the southeastern United States, and carrying the same small white flowers and, on female plants, small red berries.
Ilex ‘Sparkleberry’ is the aristocrat of the winterberries, a vigorous hybrid holly bred from the native winterberry, Ilex verticillata, and the Japanese winterberry, Ilex serrata. William F. Kosar made the cross at the U.S. National Arboretum in 1961, and the Arboretum released the plant in 1978, together with a male from the same cross named ‘Apollo’. The pairing brought hybrid vigor and a heavier, longer-holding crop: tall, upright stems that shed their leaves in fall and blaze with bright red fruit, persisting so well that the berries often hang on into March.
Jasminum x stephanense, the Stephan jasmine, is the rare pink-flowered hybrid of the group, a cross between the red jasmine, Jasminum beesianum, and the poet's jasmine, Jasminum officinale. The vigorous, semi-evergreen scrambling vine carries small, soft pink, fragrant flowers over slender stems clothed in fine pinnate leaves, combining the pink of one parent with the hardiness and perfume of the other.
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.
Bold, burnished orange trumpets in generous early-summer clusters make Lonicera × tellmanniana one of the most striking climbing honeysuckles ever raised. The hybrid crosses the American coral honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, with the large-flowered Chinese Lonicera tragophylla, and takes the best of each: vivid color, strong growth, and clean foliage, without the invasive streak of the weedy honeysuckles.
'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.
Pistacia chinensis, the Chinese pistache, is a medium-sized deciduous tree and a close relative of the pistachio nut, though this species carries no crop for the table. What the tree offers instead is one of the finest autumn shows in the warm South: lustrous, dark green compound leaves that ignite, nearly all at once, into a fire of scarlet, orange, and red before they fall.
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.
A conifer of mist and mountains, Podocarpus parlatorei comes from isolated cloud-forest ridges just east of the Andes in Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. Rare in the wild and scarcely seen in cultivation, this CITES-listed species is one of the most unusual evergreen introductions Woodlanders has ever offered.
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.
For a plant this common, the Christmas fern carries an oddly specific origin for the name. The fern was christened, the story goes, by one John Robinson, a botany professor at the Peabody Academy in Salem, Massachusetts, sometime in the late 1800s, and set down for posterity in a 1923 volume with the irreproachable title The Fern-Lover's Companion. Robinson's reasoning was seasonal. When the other ferns of the eastern woods go brown and crisp at the first hard frost, Polystichum acrostichoides holds green straight through December, which made the plant the fern people cut for wreaths and mantels at Christmas. There is a second theory, quieter and harder to settle, that the name comes from the leaflets themselves: look closely and each pinna carries a small lobe at its base, an ear or a thumb, that gives the leaflet the outline of a Christmas stocking. Both camps are probably right.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Plant type
Fern
Traditional use
pain relief, respiratory support, digestive health
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.
Quercus michauxii is a big, generous bottomland oak that borrows the best of two better-known relatives: the pale, flaky, handsome bark of the white oak, and the large, coarsely toothed, chestnut-shaped leaves of the chestnut oak. The result is one of the noblest of the Southern hardwoods. In Coker and Totten's Trees of the Southeastern States, a 1931 letter from James Henry Rice, Jr. of Colleton County, South Carolina, put it plainly: "It is a noble and beautiful tree and might be termed majestic with no violence to the language."
The first surprise of Quercus phellos is that nobody believes they're an oak. The leaves are narrow and untoothed, willow-like, finer than an oak has any right to be, and they turn soft yellow before they fall; only the acorns, small and round and produced by the thousand, give the game away.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
The lesser-known of the two Hong Kong roses in the Woodlanders collection, Rhodoleia henryi is a handsome evergreen shrub or small tree from southern China and Taiwan, still little grown in the United States and, like much of the genus, occasionally muddled in the naming. Set beside the sister species Rhodoleia championii, this plant carries narrower, more pointed leaves, and the species is reckoned the more cold hardy of the two, a useful distinction for gardeners testing the edge of the range.
