The plants we can't stop growing. Our Favorites are the ones we reach for again and again, the plants that have earned a permanent place in our own gardens and our hearts, and the ones we most love to press into a customer's hands.
Buddleia davidii 'Attraction' is a more compact butterfly bush than the usual run of the species, forming a rounded shrub of arching branches lined with gray-green leaves. From summer into fall, royal red, fragrant flowers gather in nodding panicles six to ten inches long, drawing butterflies and bees in profusion.
In the dead of winter, when the garden asks for little and gives less, Lonicera × purpusii answers with perfume. This winter honeysuckle is a hybrid of two Chinese species, Lonicera fragrantissima and Lonicera standishii, and carries the best of both: small, creamy-white, tubular flowers that open along the bare stems from late winter into early spring, throwing a clean, lemon-sweet fragrance that carries yards on a mild day.
No genus carries more Carolina history in its name than this one. Indigofera means indigo-bearing, and indigo was the blue that built the colonial Lowcountry: in the 1740s a young Eliza Lucas Pinckney coaxed a successful crop out of the land around Charleston, and for a generation the dye stood second only to rice among the colony's exports, made with skill drawn largely from enslaved West Africans, until the Revolution cut the British bounty and the fields went quiet. The plant that did that work was Indigofera tinctoria.
There is a strange romance buried in this plant's history, and 'Golden King' sits on the male side of it. Aucuba japonica reached England in 1783 as a single female, the yellow-flecked gold dust shrub that Victorians went on to plant by the thousand. Aucuba carry their sexes on separate plants, and for eighty years every aucuba in the country was a clone of that one female, waiting on the famous red berries that never came, because Japan had sealed its borders and no male could be had.
Penstemon digitalis is one of the most adaptable of the native beardtongues, a clump-forming perennial of moist meadows, prairies, and open woods across the eastern and central United States. 'Husker Red', selected at the University of Nebraska and named Perennial Plant of the Year in 1996, keeps all the toughness of the wild species but wears it in deep wine-red: a basal rosette of glossy maroon foliage that holds color from spring through fall.
Maidenhairs take their English name from their stems, those fine black wiry stalks like strands of dark hair, and their Latin name from a quieter trick. Adiantum comes from the Greek adiantos, the unwetted one, because water will not cling to the fronds. Hold a maidenhair under a running tap and the frond comes out dry, the droplets beading and rolling off a surface built to refuse them. That is the sort of small marvel ferns keep to themselves until you go looking. This particular maidenhair breaks the family mold in one telling way. Where the rest are a byword for fragility, all lace and apology, the rosy maidenhair is faintly hairy and unbothered. Run a fingertip up the stipe and you will feel the bristles that named the fern: hispidulum, minutely hairy, set down by the Swedish botanist Olof Swartz in 1802.
This very rare aster, now placed in the genus Eurybia, is a true Florida endemic, native only to the moist pine flatwoods of the lower Apalachicola River. The plant is a botanical oddity: the clumping, foot-tall foliage is narrow, stiff, and grass-like, so unlike the leafy stems of an ordinary aster that a passerby might take the clump for a tuft of sedge. From late spring into early summer, slender flower stems rise above the leaves carrying clusters of inch-wide lavender-purple daisies, each ringing a small yellow eye.
Physostegia correllii, Correll's obedient plant, is a rare and handsome member of the mint family, a robust, upright, somewhat succulent perennial rising from thick, spreading rhizomes. Among the false dragonheads the species stands out for unusually dark, glossy green leaves and cool purplish-pink flowers streaked and spotted with darker purple, an inch long and packed into dense terminal spikes.
Step into a North American wetlands grove, and you'll find Osmunda cinnamomea, the majestic cinnamon fern, standing tall on fronds that arch with the dignity of cathedral windows. Native to rich, damp woodlands and boggy stream edges across eastern North America, this stately fern thrives in humus-laden soil, the base cloaked in cinnamon-colored fibers that inspired the common name. In spring, the center of each dark green vase unleashes erect fertile fronds, spore-tossing cinnamon sticks that rise above the sterile foliage before maturing to warm, russet brown.
The turtlehead is named twice over for things that go quiet. The genus Chelone is the Greek word for tortoise, after a nymph who mocked the marriage of Zeus and Hera and was turned, for her insolence, into a creature that carries her house and holds her tongue; one look at the flower, a hinged, swollen, pink-and-gaping thing that seems about to either speak or bite, and you see why the name stuck. The species honors John Lyon, the Scottish plant hunter who worked the southern Appalachians in the footsteps of Bartram and Michaux. Lyon collected this turtlehead somewhere in the mountains around 1812 without recording quite where, noting only in his catalog that here was a new species, and a beautiful one; his friend Frederick Pursh later pinned Lyon's name to the plant. Lyon did not have long to enjoy the honor, dying in 1814 in the same southern mountains that had made his name. The plant has fared better. Chelone lyonii grows wild along streambanks and seeps in the high southern Appalachians, and 'Hot Lips' is the selection that turned the color up, deeper rose-pink flowers over foliage that emerges with a bronze cast. The flowers arrive in late summer and run into fall, which is the real gift, holding color in the moist and shaded corners just as the rest of the garden tires. Only a bumblebee is strong enough to force the blooms open, so a planting in flower comes with a low percussion of bees muscling in and backing out. Give them wet feet and a little shade and there is very little that does a damp, difficult spot this gracefully, or this late.
Myrcianthes fragrans is a member of the myrtle family native to the hammocks and coastal scrub of Florida and the Caribbean, the same botanical neighborhood as guava and allspice, which says something about the family character and the quality of the fragrance involved. Crush a leaf and the scent is immediate and specific: nutmeg with a citrus edge, clean and resinous in a way that makes the plant worth encountering even out of flower. The tiny, deep green leaves hold the aromatic oils responsible, and keep that quality year-round.
The southern shield fern carries a longer pedigree than most ferns in cultivation. The type specimen was collected by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland near Cumanacoa, in the cloud-shrouded country around Caripe in northeastern Venezuela, during their five-year expedition through the equinoctial Americas. Decades later the German botanist Carl Sigismund Kunth, Humboldt's assistant in Paris and the man who would spend years describing the ten thousand and more specimens the explorers shipped home, became the namesake when Nicaise Auguste Desvaux formally described the species in 1827 as Nephrodium kunthii. C.V. Morton moved the fern into Thelypteris in 1967, and recent molecular work (Fawcett and Smith, 2021) has shifted the name again into Pelazoneuron, though the older binomial remains the one in common horticultural use.
They carry their Roman name almost unchanged. Tinus was what the Romans called the shrub two thousand years ago, the name Pliny the Elder set down in his Natural History, and when Linnaeus came to catalogue them he simply kept it. The reason gardeners have held onto Viburnum tinus just as long is that they flower in the cold. While the rest of the garden is shut down for winter, they cover themselves in tight clusters of deep carmine buds that open a few at a time across weeks into small white flowers, so they carry both colors at once through the bleakest stretch of the year. The foliage is the second argument, dense and dark and glossy, evergreen to the ground with none of the gapping that lesser shrubs fall into. 'Spring Bouquet' is the compact, well-behaved selection, rounding into a tidy four to six feet, which makes it the one to reach for when you want a hedge, a low screen, or a piece of evergreen structure that also happens to bloom in February. Metallic blue-black berries follow for the birds, set best when more than one plant grows nearby. They take shade, salt, and coastal wind without complaint. Few evergreens hand you this much in the dead of winter, which is precisely the season you'll be grateful for it.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
Among ornamental grasses, Chasmanthium latifolium is the rare one that thrives in shade. River oats, also called northern sea oats and inland sea oats, is a clumping, rhizomatous perennial grass of the eastern and central United States, found in the wild along wooded creek banks, river bottoms, and shaded slopes from Pennsylvania south to Florida and west toward the prairies. The broad, bamboo-like blades are wider than most grasses can claim, and the plant carries them in a loose, arching mound that takes deep shade without sulking.
The southern maidenhair has a way of choosing impossible places. Look for this fern on a shaded limestone bluff where water seeps through the rock, or in the spray zone of a spring-fed creek, and you will likely find the fronds growing sideways out of a crevice as if that were the most natural thing in the world. The wiry black stems hold up fan-shaped pinnules so thin they seem almost translucent in morning light, and the whole plant trembles at the slightest breath of air. Few native ferns carry this much delicacy with so little fuss.
Every grafted citrus tree is two plants pretending to be one: a familiar fruiting top, and a rootstock below the graft union doing the unglamorous work of roots, vigor, and disease resistance. US-1516 is one of the latter, and a good story all the same. The cross was made by the USDA in 1975, a pairing of opposites: African pummelo, the giant of the genus, crossed with Flying Dragon, the contorted, fiercely thorned, cold-hardy form of trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata) that lends so many hardy citrus their backbone. The seedlings went into the ground at the Whitmore farm in Groveland, Florida in 1976 and then, in the patient way of tree breeding, were watched for forty years. Kim Bowman's program at the USDA lab in Fort Pierce released them at last in 2015, into the worst of the huanglongbing epidemic, the bacterial greening disease that has hollowed out Florida's groves. On infected ground they keep their grafted tops healthier and more productive than the old standbys. We offer them ungrafted, which is an unusual thing to sell and an honest one: this is a tree for the cold-hardy citrus tinkerer, the person who wants to practice budding, raise their own understock, or simply grow the trifoliate-blooded foundation and see how far north the plant will go. They come nearly true from seed, vigorous and uniform, and they ask only that you have plans for them. Graft them bold, or just let them teach you the lower half of the tree.
Staghorn sumac is a bold native shrub or small tree of the northeastern United States and Canada, growing fifteen to thirty feet on stout, forking stems clothed in fine velvety hairs, the texture and antler-like branching that give the plant the name. The big, pinnate leaves are bright green through summer and turn a spectacular blend of yellow, orange, and red in fall, one of the great autumn shrubs of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–30 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
The Lenten rose is not a rose at all, but a member of the buttercup tribe that happens to flower around Lent, in the raw weeks of late winter when the garden is otherwise bare. The blooms are nodding cups a couple of inches across, held just above the foliage in white, cream, pink, plum, and a smoky green, many of them freckled or veined at the throat. What look like petals are in fact sepals, which is the secret of the long show: rather than dropping in days, the flowers hold for weeks and age slowly to green, carrying color from late winter well into spring.
Among the most bewitching sights in the summer garden, Colocasia esculenta 'Black Magic' rises like a gothic dream from the soil, the velvety, purple-black leaves casting deep shade and deeper admiration. Sometimes called the Jet Black Wonder, this dramatic taro cultivar has become a garden sensation across the South, beloved for bold color and architectural form.
