A fine-textured native yucca from the Texas hill country. Yucca constricta, the Buckley yucca, forms a stemless or short-stemmed rosette, single or clustered, of many very narrow, blue-green, spine-tipped leaves edged with curling white marginal filaments. The species honors the nineteenth-century naturalist Samuel Botsford Buckley, and the epithet constricta notes the narrowed leaves that give the plant a softer, more delicate look than the bolder yuccas.
Yuzu Ichandrin is not a lemon. This is something older and considerably more interesting, a naturally occurring hybrid between Ichang papeda, Citrus ichangensis, and Satsuma mandarin, long cultivated across the high-elevation citrus regions of China and Japan, and among the most cold-hardy citrus in existence. Where standard yuzu, Citrus junos, and true lemons would surrender to a Southern winter, Ichandrin holds. Mature, established trees have come through ten degrees Fahrenheit with nothing worse than tip dieback. This is, by any honest measure, the citrus a zone 7 or 8 gardener actually gets to keep.
A native tree that bites back, and can numb a toothache. Zanthoxylum clava-herculis, the toothache tree or Hercules' club, is a small to medium deciduous tree of the citrus family, native along the coastal Southeast from Virginia to Florida and Texas. The genus name Zanthoxylum means yellow wood, and the species clava-herculis, the club of Hercules, names the stout, spiny, club-shaped trunk that is the tree's signature.
One of the finest shade trees for a hard place. Zelkova serrata, the Japanese zelkova, is a deciduous tree of the elm family, native to Japan, Korea, and eastern China, long valued as the sacred keyaki of Japanese temples and a prized timber and bonsai subject. In the West the tree has become a leading street and lawn tree, in no small part as a graceful, disease-resistant stand-in for the American elms lost to Dutch elm disease.
A rare gem of the Southeastern coastal plain, chosen for the bluest foliage of the tribe. Zenobia pulverulenta 'Woodlanders Blue' is a semi-evergreen shrub of the heath family, native to the pocosins and pine savannas of the coastal Carolinas, and grown above all for striking powder-blue, glaucous foliage and hanging clusters of white, bell-shaped flowers in early summer. Woodlanders selected and introduced this exceptionally blue form, which has since won wider recognition.
A native lily that answers the rain. Zephyranthes atamasco, the atamasco lily or rain lily, is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to moist woods and meadows of the Southeastern United States. The name atamasco comes from the Powhatan people of the Virginia tidewater, an old word carried into botany, and the plant has also long been called Easter lily for the season of bloom.
