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.
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.
Malvaviscus drummondii is the small Turk's cap, the wild, native cousin of the larger Mexican wax mallow and, for many Southern gardeners, the better plant of the two. A relative of the hibiscus in the mallow family, Malvaceae, this shrubby perennial is native to Texas, the Gulf Coast states, and on south, and grows wild in the dappled shade of woodland edges and stream banks where few other bright flowers will bloom.
Morella pumila is the dwarf waxmyrtle, a low, native evergreen that keeps everything gardeners love about the common wax myrtle, aromatic foliage, waxy berries, and a tough constitution, and shrinks it all to knee height. Native to the frequently burned pinelands of the southern United States, the plant is an adaptation to that fiery world, staying small and spreading slowly into dense patches and colonies by underground runners.
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.
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.
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.
Salvia 'Indigo Spires' is a big, free-flowering hybrid sage grown for the long, tapering wands of violet-blue bloom it throws from early summer straight through to frost. Each spike packs small, rich violet flowers tightly in whorls above dark, near-black calyces, and the spikes lengthen and curve as the season goes, so a settled clump reads as a haze of deep blue-purple for months on end. Few perennials give so much color for so long a run.
Salvia leucantha, the Mexican bush sage, is one of the great fall salvias, grown for arching wands of flower that seem spun from felt. Long spikes rise above the foliage in late summer and fall, densely packed with velvety purple calyces from which small white corollas emerge, a soft two-tone effect that catches low autumn light and holds for weeks. Few plants close the gardening year with such generous, easy color.
Selaginella braunii, known in older texts as Selaginella involvens and in gardens as Braun's spikemoss or the arborvitae fern, belongs to one of the oldest surviving lineages of plants on Earth. The Selaginellas are not true ferns but spikemosses, an ancient group whose ancestry runs back more than three hundred million years, long before flowering plants reshaped the world. In the shaded understory of primeval forests these plants held their ground, and Braun's spikemoss carries that inheritance forward with quiet dignity.
Threadleaf bluestar is grown for two seasons at once: a haze of soft, powder-blue stars in late spring, and a billow of fine, needle-thin foliage that turns a blazing clear gold in fall. Native to the Ouachita Mountains of central Arkansas, Amsonia hubrichtii forms a large, dense, shrub-like clump of upright stems clothed in those threadlike leaves, and the autumn color alone earns a place in any sunny border.
Swamp milkweed brings beauty and biodiversity to the moist garden. Asclepias incarnata is a native perennial prized for domed clusters of rosy pink, vanilla-scented flowers and for a vital role in feeding pollinators, native to wet meadows, streambanks, and lowland prairies across much of North America. The plant takes happily to rain gardens, wet soils, and sunny borders alike, a natural for the ecologically minded gardener.
A yellow-flowered butterfly bush, Buddleia x weyeriana 'Honeycomb' is a vigorous hybrid of Buddleia globosa and Buddleia davidii that the late Dr. Michael Dirr judged better than the older 'Sungold'. The plant came to Dirr from Crathes Castle Garden in Scotland, bought as the variety 'E.H. Wilson' but proving to be a very different and superior yellow butterfly bush, named 'Honeycomb' and a standout in Georgia trials, flowering as late as Thanksgiving.
Native to the open prairies and meadows of North America, Coreopsis lanceolata, the lanceleaf coreopsis, has long been admired for bright, golden-yellow blooms and an easy, hardy nature. This perennial wildflower has been a staple of North American landscapes for a very long time, growing across a wide range of climates and soils, from sandy coastal ground to the rich prairies of the Midwest.
Coreopsis verticillata, the threadleaf coreopsis, is a clump-forming native perennial dressed in fine, thread-like foliage and covered through the long weeks of summer in small, bright yellow, daisy-like flowers. Native to the open woods and clearings of the eastern United States, threadleaf coreopsis has become one of the most popular of all garden perennials, an easy, airy, long-blooming plant for the sunny border.
Cyrilla parviflora, the Littleleaf Cyrilla, is a small, understated shrub that carries the quiet resilience of the southeastern wetlands. A close relative of the larger Cyrilla racemiflora, this plant offers a finer, more delicate presence, with slender glossy leaves and airy clusters of tiny white flowers.
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.
Pineland hibiscus is the wilder, pricklier cousin among the native mallows, and all the more charming for a slightly untamed look. Through the summer the plant opens broad flowers several inches across in soft creamy yellow, each centered on a deep maroon eye, the classic hibiscus form scaled down and set on a low, spreading, bristly frame. The deeply lobed leaves are rough to the touch and the stems carry fine prickles, so the whole plant reads as a hardy native of open, sunny ground rather than a pampered border hybrid.
