Crush a leaf of any Myrica and the whole plant declares itself, spicy and balsamic, the scent that gives the bayberries and wax myrtles their name. The gray berries wear a coat of true wax, once boiled off in kettles to pour bayberry candles that burn clean and faintly fragrant. Underground the plants strike a bargain with Frankia bacteria and fix their own nitrogen, which is how a wax myrtle thrives on poor coastal sand where fussier shrubs starve.

A word on names, honestly given: botanists now place the southern wax myrtle, long grown as Myrica cerifera, in the genus Morella, though the old name is the one most gardeners still search. The clan ranges from that tough evergreen screen to Myrica rubra, the Chinese yangmei, a fruiting tree whose sweet-tart red drupes have been prized across East Asia for centuries.