Two things the common names get wrong: it is not Chinese, and it is not a maple. Abutilon pictum comes from the warm river country of southern Brazil and its neighbors, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the maple lives only in the leaves, which are lobed and toothed enough to have fooled people into "flowering maple." It belongs instead to the mallow family, in good company with hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and it carries that resemblance in every five-petaled bloom.
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.
A small, bright green agave with a clean white stripe down the center of each short, broad, toothed leaf, Agave lophantha 'Splendida' is a compact, clumping selection of a species native to South Texas and Mexico. The variegated rosettes stay neat and low, a jewel-box agave for a trough, a container, or the front of a hot, sunny bed.
The tung oil tree is a handsome medium-sized deciduous tree, broad and spreading, with large heart-shaped to lobed leaves up to ten inches across and showy panicles of white flowers, blushed pink and orange at the throat, that open in spring before or with the new foliage. Few flowering trees of the Deep South make a fuller spring show.
The pawpaw is a small, tropical-looking deciduous tree with large, drooping leaves and the largest edible fruit native to this country. In mid to late summer the green, mango-shaped fruit softens to a fragrant custard, banana and mango in one, around rows of big dark seeds, relished by people and raccoons alike. The crushed leaves carry a distinctive odor, and the whole tree reads more like the tropics than a temperate woodland.
Callicarpa acuminata, the black beautyberry, is the Mexican cousin of the familiar American beautyberry, a deciduous shrub of arching branches that, in fall, lines the stems with clusters of small, shiny berries in glossy black rather than the usual purple. The dark fruit is a quiet, sophisticated turn on the beautyberry idea, set off by the green leaves and lingering into the cool months.
The white-fruited form of the Asian beautyberry, Callicarpa dichotoma 'Albifructus' is a quiet pleasure of the late-summer border: instead of the usual magenta, the arching stems hang with luminous, ivory-white berries in elegant clusters, cool and refined where the purple kinds are bold. Native to eastern Asia, in Korea, China, and Japan, the white beautyberry is smaller and more graceful than the American species, and all the more striking for the restraint.
Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
An honest admission to start: we do not know her name. Camellia japonica has been bred and named for the better part of three centuries, the roll of registered cultivars runs well into the thousands, and behind those stand thousands more good selections that were grown, loved, handed over a fence, and quietly parted from their labels along the way. This is one of the latter, a pale-pink japonica of real quality and no surviving paperwork, the kind of plant that turns up in old Southern gardens where someone's grandmother knew exactly what it was and never thought to write it down.
There is a quiet poetry in a camellia's defiance of the cold, a flowering that comes not in spring's abundance but in the leanest stretch of the year. Few cultivars speak that winter sonnet as clearly as Camellia 'Crimson Candles', a hybrid of Camellia reticulata and Camellia fraterna.
Citrumelo 'Dunstan' is a hardy heirloom hybrid of the rugged trifoliate orange, Citrus trifoliata, and the sunlit grapefruit, Citrus paradisi, and from that unlikely marriage comes a fruit and tree of real merit. The golden-yellow globes swell to nearly four inches across, fragrant, and, touched with sugar, carry the tart refreshment of a grapefruit picked a little shy of ripe. Here is fruit both rustic and refined, bred for survival yet still hinting at the orchard.
Clethra alnifolia, the summersweet or sweet pepperbush, is a deciduous native of the eastern United States, at home along pond edges, in damp woods, and at the margins of coastal swamps from Maine to Florida. The species spreads gently by suckers into colonies of upright stems, and earns the name sweet pepperbush from the small, peppercorn-like seed capsules that follow the flowers and hang on through winter. For all that, the summer flowers are the reason to grow them: erect bottlebrush spikes, intensely honey-scented, that open over many weeks in the heat of July and August when little else in the shrub border is in bloom.
‘Amber Blush’ is a soft-toned selection of the native scarlet calamint, Clinopodium coccineum, an aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family from the deep sands of the southeastern coastal plain. Where the wild species flowers in hot scarlet, this clone brings a gentler and more complicated color to the same tough, hummingbird-visited plant: bright yellow washed with orange, deepening toward amber.
This is a tree you harvest from a boat. Crataegus opaca, the western mayhaw, grows wild in the flooded bottoms of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the cypress sloughs and pond margins of east Texas, Louisiana, and the Deep South, and when their fruit ripens in late spring it drops straight into the water and floats. For generations Southern families went out in May with boats, nets, and scoops to gather the bobbing red haws off the surface, a fast three weeks of work that turned into a year's worth of jelly. The name says as much: mayhaw, for the month, and haw, the old word for hawthorn.
Japanese cedar is a tall, pyramidal to conical evergreen conifer, and the great timber tree of Japan, where the sugi soars past a hundred feet and lines temple avenues and mountain forests alike. The blue-green needles are held close and awl-shaped, taking on a bronzy, purple-bronze cast through cold winters before recovering their color in spring. The reddish-brown bark peels in long fibrous strips down a straight, buttressed trunk.
Distylium myricoides belongs to the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, an evergreen cousin of the fragrant winter witch-hazels, though the kinship shows in the flowers rather than the leaves. The Piroche form is a distinct, low-slung selection of the species, chosen for a broad, spreading habit and strong horizontal branching that make the plant read more as living groundwork than as an upright shrub.
There is a moment in early spring when a new frond of Dryopteris erythrosora 'Brilliance' unfurls, and the sight is one of the more quietly spectacular things a shade garden produces. The emerging fronds are a vivid copper-orange, almost metallic in certain light, deepening through pink and bronze before settling into the glossy dark green of maturity. 'Brilliance' is a selected form of the autumn fern chosen specifically for the intensity of that color progression, pushing the coppery new growth further than the straight species manages and holding the color longer. In a garden where most plants arrive already green, this is a meaningful distinction.
Duranta serratifolia, the tala blanco of northern Argentina, is a South American cousin of the familiar golden dewdrop and belongs, like all Duranta, to the verbena family. The species epithet serratifolia means saw-toothed leaf, for the finely serrated margins that separate this plant from the smoother-leaved dewdrops. In the wild the shrub grows through the dry forests and thorn scrub of the Argentine northwest, where the common name, roughly white tala, sets the plant among the talas, the spiny native trees and shrubs that give those woodlands their character.
The limequat was born of catastrophe. After the twin freezes of 1894 and 1895 laid waste to Florida's groves, Walter T. Swingle of the United States Department of Agriculture set out to breed citrus that could shrug off a cold snap, and in 1909 he crossed the sharp little West Indian or Key lime (Citrus aurantifolia) with the round Marumi kumquat (Fortunella japonica). Named and introduced in 1913 alongside a sister seedling called Lakeland, the Eustis limequat stands among the first successful intergeneric citrus hybrids, living proof that two separate genera could be wedded and still bear generous fruit.
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
