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
Everyone who grows the native beautyberry knows the plant by the autumn display: those improbable whorls of magenta-purple fruit circling every stem like something a florist arranged and forgot to bill for. 'Welch's Pink' is that plant, in a color the species was not supposed to have.
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.
Callicarpa dichotoma 'Issai', the purple beautyberry, is a compact, cold-hardy selection grown for a heavy crop of glossy, violet-purple berries that ring the stems from late summer well into fall. Smaller and tidier than the American beautyberry, 'Issai' fruits young and freely, often setting berries on a single plant, and holds the color long after the leaves have gone.
This is a Woodlanders plant in the most literal sense: selected, named, and introduced to the American nursery trade by this nursery, in this town, decades ago. The cultivar now carries our name across the country. One Green World in Oregon, Cistus on Sauvie Island, Greenleaf as a national wholesaler, Wilson Bros in three-gallon, Cloud Mountain Farm in Washington, Dancing Oaks in the Willamette Valley, and dozens of regional nurseries from Louisiana to Idaho all carry the plant. Few cultivars in American horticulture are so permanently tied to a single small nursery in Aiken, South Carolina. To buy here is to buy at the source.
Calluna vulgaris 'Gold Haze' is a heather grown as much for foliage as for flower: tight, upright sprays of bright golden growth that hold their color through the year and warm to a deeper gold in winter cold. Set in drifts, the plants knit into a low, even evergreen carpet.
Camellia saluensis 'Appleblossom' is a pink-flowered selection of the Salween camellia, chosen for the abundance of soft, single, apple-blossom-pink flowers borne in late winter and spring. What sets this plant apart is not a registration certificate but a story: the stock came originally from the Norfolk, Virginia garden of the late Frederic Heutte, the French-born plantsman who served as the first director of Norfolk Botanical Garden.
Canna flaccida is the wild golden canna of the Southern coastal plain, a native perennial with the broad, light green, tropical-looking leaves of the genus and large soft yellow flowers held above them in summer. Where the heavy garden cannas read as bedding, this species keeps a looser, wilder grace, the petals thin and almost orchid-like, opening in the morning and lasting a day.
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.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the Morton citrange is a handsome one. Like other sweet orange and trifoliate orange crosses, Morton makes an attractive ornamental evergreen, with fragrant white spring flowers and orange fruit, but the fruit here sets the cultivar apart: large, smooth-skinned, and remarkably like a true orange, with very few seeds.
A very old Chinese cultivar, almost certainly named for the capital of Hunan province where the fruit has been grown for centuries, and quite possibly carrying C. ichangensis somewhere in the parentage. That suspected ancestry would account for the cold tolerance that has made Changsha the parent stock for nearly every modern hardy citrus breeding program of consequence: Wayne Hanna's seedless work at UGA Tifton, the Arctic Frost satsuma cross out of Texas, and others still in trial.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the Keraji mandarin is a favorite of the group. A medium-sized evergreen tree with the usual fragrant white citrus flowers, Keraji follows them with what Tom McClendon, in Hardy Citrus for the Southeast, calls "small, yellow, flattened tangerines that have a sweet lemonade taste unlike any other citrus fruits." That flavor is the whole reason to grow the tree, and Keraji has proven quite hardy in Augusta, Georgia since 1997.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and Citrus taiwanica is one of the tougher evergreens of the group. A vigorous, upright, spreading, thorny tree, the Taiwan orange bears sour tangerine-to-orange fruit that is both ornamental and useful, the base of a very tasty ade. One of the hardier evergreen citrus, the tree sets good crops here in Aiken, South Carolina.
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.
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.
Clinopodium georgianum is a low, aromatic shrublet of the mint family, prized for highly scented foliage and clouds of pinkish-lavender flowers in late summer and fall, when much of the garden is winding down. Georgia savory makes a fine edging or front-of-border plant for sunny or lightly shaded spots with good drainage, and unlike most of the tribe, this southern native will grow in heavier soils as well as sand.
Conradina canescens 'Gray Mound' is a silver-leaved selection of the false rosemary that grows wild on the deep, pine-fringed sands of the northern Gulf Coast, in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle, where the species once mingled with sea oats and longleaf pine. A member of the mint family, this aromatic shrub carries soft, needle-like foliage in a ghostly silver-gray, and from spring into early summer, sometimes again in the cool of fall, offers a flush of pale lavender to bluish, two-lipped flowers that native bees and butterflies work eagerly.
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.
Few hardy shrubs put on a show like Caesalpinia gilliesii, the desert bird of paradise, whose summer flowers open clear yellow and send out a spray of long scarlet stamens like fireworks caught mid-burst. A legume from the dry country of Argentina and Uruguay, long naturalized across the American Southwest, the plant carries ferny, blue-green, mimosa-like foliage that sets off the flamboyant bloom. Botanists now place the species in the genus Erythrostemon, meaning red stamen, though gardeners still know the plant as Caesalpinia.
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.
