Plants with a place in the medicine chest of history. The medicinal mavens gather the herbs, shrubs, and trees that people have turned to for healing and wellbeing across centuries and cultures, grown here for their beauty, their stories, and their long human use.
Baccharis halimifolia is a plant of edges and thresholds, growing where the land loosens and blurs into water: salt marsh margins, ditches, tidal creeks, and back dunes. In fall, when most things are shutting down, the groundsel bush erupts into a soft storm of white seed fluff, like a marsh firework frozen mid-explosion. This is the shrub that coastal Louisiana calls manglier, that botanists call groundsel bush or eastern baccharis, and that local healers have quietly trusted for generations.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–10 ft.
Spread
5–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, immune support, detoxification & cleansing, general wellness
Called Philippine violet, though neither Philippine nor a violet, Barleria cristata is a showy subtropical shrub that saves its display for the close of the year, opening dark blue-violet, trumpet-shaped flowers through late summer and autumn when much of the garden is winding down. A perennial in zones 8 and 9 and a four-to-six-foot shrub in zone 10, native to India and Myanmar.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
24–30 in.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, pain relief, general wellness
On the deep Kalahari sands, where a hard year brings barely fourteen inches of rain, this bauhinia grows as a spreading, half-scrambling shrub, now and then gathering enough height to pass for a small tree at twenty feet. The leaves give the genus away at a glance: two rounded lobes joined at the base, the shape everyone calls a camel's foot or a cow's hoof, blue-green and leathery enough to shrug off a dry season. Then, in summer, the shrub opens flowers that look too large and too fine for the country they came from, five crinkled white petals with a fringed, almost torn edge, carried in flushes that run on into autumn. In Botswana and Zimbabwe the grey louries and the parrots come to eat them.
Buddleja salviifolia, the sage-leaf butterfly bush, is a medium to large evergreen shrub from the sun-soaked hillsides of South Africa, and despite the exotic origin the plant has proven remarkably hardy in southeastern gardens, coming through winters at the University of Georgia's Athens trials with quiet resilience.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Callerya reticulata, the evergreen wisteria, is one of the most graceful vines for the Southern garden, and one of the most refined. Once known to botanists as Millettia reticulata and Wisteria reticulata, this evergreen climber is not a true wisteria, though the cascading habit and aristocratic bearing recall one. A vine for porches and pergolas, the evergreen wisteria prizes quiet bloom over brash spectacle, and carries both fragrance and folklore in the tendrils.
The genus name says it: Callicarpa, from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, beautiful fruit, a genus named for exactly what it does. Callicarpa americana, the American beautyberry, is the southeastern native that gives the genus a calling card. From late August into November, the plant sets dense clusters of small drupes in a luminous magenta-purple, a color that registers as almost unreal in the late-summer landscape, somewhere between fuchsia and amethyst, with no real precedent among native fruits. The berries gather in tight whorls around the stem at every leaf node, all the way down the arching branches, so that a mature shrub in October looks less like a shrub bearing fruit than a ribbon of purple glass beads strung along the branches.
Hardiness
Zones 7–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, immune support
'Profusion' is the beautyberry that finally made the genus behave. A Dutch selection out of Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii, a deciduous shrub from west and central China, this clone was chosen for one quality above all: fruit, in quantity, on a young plant, without needing a second shrub nearby to make it happen. Upright arching canes reach eight to ten feet, carrying bronze-purple new growth that shifts to pinkish purple in autumn. Small lilac-pink flowers open at the end of summer, unremarkable and much loved by bees. Then in October the point of the whole thing arrives: tight clusters of berries in a violet so saturated and so metallic that first-time visitors routinely assume the shrub has been sprayed. The berries hold on long after the leaves have gone, which is exactly when a garden needs them.
Callicarpa dichotoma belongs to the mint family, Lamiaceae, though the beautyberries wear their kinship lightly. The genus name comes from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, a promise the plant keeps every autumn, while the epithet dichotoma describes the way the slender branches fork in neat pairs, giving the shrub a tiered, arching silhouette. Native across East Asia, from China and Korea into Japan and Vietnam, the purple beautyberry has long been grown for that moment in late summer when clusters of small violet fruits ripen along the stems and hold on well after the leaves have gone.
This is the tea plant. Not a tea plant but the tea plant. Every cup of green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong, and pu-erh on Earth comes from a single species, Camellia sinensis. The differences in flavor and color come from the timing of the harvest and the way the leaves are handled afterward: green tea from the youngest leaves, briefly steamed; white tea from the unopened buds; black tea from fully oxidized older leaves; oolong from partial oxidation. One plant, many fates.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
'Rosea' is a pink-flowered form of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, the same species behind every cup of green, black, white, and oolong tea, here carrying soft pink flowers in place of the usual white and a reddish flush through the new foliage. The leaves still make tea, so this is an ornamental and a useful plant at once, a little prettier in flower than the straight species and just as willing in the garden.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
4–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
Buttonbush is a rounded, deciduous native shrub, easily trained as a small multi-stemmed tree, grown for the curious globe-shaped flowers that give the plant its name. From early summer into fall, creamy-white pincushion balls about an inch across stud the branches, each a sphere of tiny tubular flowers with projecting styles that lend a fireworks effect, intensely fragrant and alive with bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Hardiness
Zones 5–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, general wellness, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications
Few plants announce themselves the way Cestrum nocturnum does, and never by daylight. Through the afternoon the shrub keeps to a quiet, almost ordinary green, the slender branches arching and half-climbing, the small tubular flowers furled and unremarkable. Then dusk arrives, the cream-green trumpets open, and the night-blooming jasmine releases a perfume so far-reaching that it carries across a whole garden on still, warm air.
Leatherleaf is the quiet constant of the northern bog. Chamaedaphne calyculata, the only species in the genus, is a low, thicket-forming evergreen of the heath family that ranges right around the cold northern world, from the peatlands of North America east to the bogs of Finland and Japan, and southward in this country to the pocosins and acid bogs of the coastal plain, as far as South Carolina. Across that vast range, leatherleaf forms the dense, spreading colonies that hold a bog together and shelter the wildlife within.
In the dead of winter, when the garden has given up on color and scent alike, Chimonanthus praecox quietly does the impossible. On bare, leafless branches, often in January and February, the wintersweet opens small, waxy, cupped stars of translucent pale yellow, each flushed at the heart with maroon, and from them pours a fragrance so rich and far-carrying that a single sprig will perfume a room. The Chinese name, la mei, the wax plum, catches the look of the petals exactly.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
12–15 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, general wellness, mental & emotional well-being
The native fringetree is one of the great small trees of the southern spring. Chionanthus virginicus, a deciduous large shrub or small tree, often multi-stemmed, hangs the whole canopy with fleecy, drooping panicles of narrow white petals in spring, soft as torn paper and lightly fragrant, a look that earned the old country names old man's beard and grancy graybeard. On female plants the flowers give way to clusters of raisin-sized, deep blue-purple fruits that birds take quickly.
The sour orange is grown across the warm world as an ornamental and even a street tree, and stands somewhat naturalized in Florida. The fruit is famous for marmalade and useful little else, since the flesh is fiercely sour and bitter, not for eating out of hand. This particular unnamed selection has a Woodlanders story: we propagated the tree from a single specimen found growing on the edge of an abandoned sandy field in a remote corner of Appling County, Georgia, with no house anywhere near. What drew us was the crop, abundant, large, and very showy, loose-skinned and easy to peel.
Clerodendrum indicum, the Turk's turban, is a bold, tropical-looking perennial that stages two very different shows in a single season. First come tall, nearly unbranched stems, ringed with long narrow leaves and topped in summer by great airy sprays of long-tubed white flowers, shooting outward like a burst of fireworks, which earns the plant its other names, tube flower and skyrocket. Then, as the blooms fade, the real surprise arrives.
A native of China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and parts of South Asia, Clerodendrum trichotomum has been cultivated in Western gardens since the mid-1800s, when the shrub was introduced from Japan and quickly adopted across Europe and the American South for uncanny late-season performance. This is the hardiest member of the genus and, for our money, the most theatrical.
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.
Crinum americanum is the swamp lily of the southeastern coastal plain, a bulb throwing broad strap-shaped leaves two to three feet long in a loose arching rosette, with scapes of about the same height carrying two to six flowers in a terminal umbel. The flowers are the whole event: glistening white, six narrow tepals recurved into a star five or six inches across, the long filaments tipped with dark anthers and often flushed rose-pink toward the base. Fragrance arrives after dark, sweet and carrying, which tells you plainly what does the pollinating. Bloom comes in waves from late spring into autumn, and nearly year-round in frost-free gardens.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, heart support
