Abutilon megapotamicum is the trailing one of the flowering maples, a slender, half-vining deciduous shrub that drapes and clambers rather than standing stiffly upright. Its species name means "of the big river," for the Rio Grande basin of southern Brazil where it grows wild, and like the rest of its tribe it belongs not to the maples its leaves suggest but to the mallow family, in company with hibiscus and hollyhock.
Acer barbatum is a medium to large deciduous tree of rounded, oval form, a southern cousin of the northern sugar maple and sometimes filed under Acer saccharum subsp. floridanum or Acer floridanum. The Florida maple is built for heat in a way the northern relative is not, smaller in every part, with leaves that are whitish beneath and a constitution suited to long, humid summers. In the wild these trees favor fertile, moist, well-drained, often calcareous ground, frequently along streams and in rich hammocks from Virginia south to the Florida panhandle and west into Texas.
Few trees carry a collector's story as plainly as the paperbark maple. Ernest Henry Wilson gathered seed of Acer griseum in central China in 1901 for the Veitch nursery, and for most of the twentieth century nearly every paperbark grown in Western gardens traced back to that introduction and one that followed. The maple sets abundant winged samaras, yet most are empty, a parthenocarpic habit that leaves only a small fraction viable. That quirk is why the species has always been scarce, slow to propagate, and quietly treasured wherever a good specimen takes hold.
Acer rubrum 'Candy Ice' is a Woodlanders introduction, found in southwest Virginia by the late Norman Beal. We use Norman's original name, though the same tree has been circulated elsewhere as 'Snowfire'. This is an unusual variegated red maple, the leaves marbled in pink, white, and green, and the foliage burns early, among the first to color when fall arrives.
A medium to large deciduous shrub closely related to the native buttonbush, Adina rubella wears smaller leaves and bears similar but daintier flowers: round, scented heads of pale pink and white, each bristling with styles into a small Sputnik, carried over a long season from early summer well into fall. The pincushion blooms draw bees and butterflies just as the buttonbushes do, and an open, arching habit gives the shrub a fine-textured grace.
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 wide-spreading, suckering, multi-stemmed deciduous shrub of slow, deliberate growth, Aesculus parviflora var. serotina carries the same upright white bottlebrush flowers as the bottlebrush buckeye, but opens them two to three weeks later, well into the heat of summer. The overall shape is irregular and almost stratified, the branches layering horizontally, and the medium to dark green leaves turn a clear yellow in fall.
The red buckeye is the South's hummingbird herald, a clump-forming, round-topped deciduous shrub or small tree whose lustrous, palmately compound leaves break very early, often before the last frosts, and whose six-inch panicles of tubular scarlet-red flowers open in spring just as the ruby-throated hummingbirds return north. The bright bloom, unusual among the buckeyes, draws hummingbirds and bees in numbers and gives the plant a long place in the affection of native-plant gardeners across the southern United States.
The yellowwoods are to South Africa roughly what the live oaks are to the Lowcountry: the tree everyone knows, the tree in the old photographs, the tree the furniture was made from. Afrocarpus falcatus, the Outeniqua yellowwood, is the tallest of them, a conifer of coastal and montane forest from the Eastern Cape north through Mozambique and Malawi, reaching thirty to sixty feet in cultivation and a great deal more in the deep forest at Tsitsikamma. The famous specimens live for centuries and carry trunks two or three feet through. Yellowwoods collectively are treated as South Africa's national tree, and cutting one is regulated by law.
Agarista populifolia, still catalogued nearly everywhere as Leucothoe populifolia, is the giant of a group otherwise built low to the ground. Where most leucothoes hug the shade at knee height, this one rises, sending up tall, erect stems that arch at the tips into a fountain of glossy evergreen leaves, and given years and room the shrub can pass for a small multi-stemmed tree of twelve to fifteen feet.
The century plant is the great architectural agave, a broad rosette of thick, gray green, spine-tipped leaves that can spread six to eight feet across, each leaf edged with hooked teeth and ending in a hard dark spine. The form is bold and symmetrical, a piece of living sculpture for a hot, dry corner, and the silver cast of the foliage carries the planting through every season.
A graceful native onion, Allium cernuum, the nodding onion, lifts loose clusters of pink to lavender, bell-shaped flowers that bend over in a soft arc at the top of slender stems, swaying through mid and late summer above tufts of grassy, blue-green foliage. The nodding habit gives the plant a particular charm, and the flowers draw native bees, butterflies, and other pollinators in good numbers.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
12–18 in.
Spread
6–8 in.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, immune support
Korean mountain ash is the unusual member of the clan, a deciduous tree from Korea, recently moved by botanists from Sorbus into the genus Alniaria, with simple, finely toothed, alder-like leaves rather than the compound leaves of the familiar mountain ashes. White flower clusters open in May, and the fall foliage turns warm shades of orange and red.
Seaside alder is a medium to large deciduous shrub, sometimes a small tree, with glossy, oval, toothed leaves and a habit of doing things backward. Where every other native alder flowers in spring, Alnus maritima opens elongated catkins in the fall, then carries small, woody, pinecone-like fruits through winter for quiet ornament.
Sweet almond verbena is grown for one glorious thing above all: scent. From midsummer until hard frost, Aloysia virgata tips every branch with slender spikes of small white flowers that pour out an intoxicating vanilla-almond fragrance, strongest in the late afternoon and evening and carrying clear across a garden. Butterflies and hummingbirds work the spikes all season.
A hardy evergreen ginger of unsettled name, this Alpinia forms dense, upright clumps of lance-shaped leaves that hold their fresh green right through the year in a mild climate, bringing a lush, tropical structure to the shade garden. In the warm months, bright yellow flower spikes rise above the foliage for an unexpected lift of color in deep shade.
Amelanchier canadensis is the coastal-plain member of a confusing and much-loved genus, a suckering multi-stemmed shrub or small tree of fifteen to twenty-five feet that reads as a thicket in the wild and as an airy vase in the garden. The show begins absurdly early: white flowers in short upright racemes open on bare gray wood while the woods are still brown, hold for a week or so, and then go. Fruit follows in June, raisin-sized, ripening green to red to a deep purple-black, sweet with a faint almond note. Autumn runs from yellow through orange to russet-red, and the bark, smooth and silver-gray with darker striping, carries the winter.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, immune support, reproductive health
Among the rarest of the serviceberries, Amelanchier nantucketensis is a low, thicket-forming shrub that Eugene Bicknell first described in 1911 from the sandplains of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island whose name the plant carries. Nantucket serviceberry belongs to a small, taxonomically slippery group within the rose family, so closely tangled with neighboring shadbushes that botanists have argued for more than a century over whether this is a true species or a stabilized hybrid. What sets the plant apart is disarmingly small: petals shorter than those of any other serviceberry in the Northeast, often dusted with pollen along their own margins, a quirk called andropetaly that appears nowhere else in the group.
Coastal serviceberry is the compact, low-growing member of a beloved native clan, a small deciduous shrub of the Atlantic coastal plain that spreads gently into colonies and opens clouds of white, five-petaled flowers in early spring, among the first shrubs to bloom as the woods wake.
Amelanchier x grandiflora is the apple serviceberry, a naturally occurring cross between two eastern natives, the downy serviceberry and the smooth Allegheny serviceberry, and 'Autumn Brilliance' is the selection that made the group famous. The Illinois nurseryman Willet Wandell found this seedling in his Urbana nursery and introduced the plant to gardens in 1986 under U.S. Plant Patent 5,717, choosing the seedling above all for the blaze of autumn color behind the name. Decades on, 'Autumn Brilliance' remains the most widely planted serviceberry in the trade, prized for a vigorous, gracefully branched frame and reliable good looks in every season.
