A silvery, soft-textured juvenile-foliage form with an unusual and well-documented history. 'Shiva' was originally presumed to be Chamaecyparis thyoides, the Atlantic white cedar, but now appears to be a form of Chamaecyparis pisifera, the sawara cypress of Japan. The plant was found as a seedling on Cape Cod by Rekha Morris of Pendleton, South Carolina, and introduced by Clarence Towe of Walhalla, South Carolina. By all signs this curious form will never become a large tree.
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 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.
Sourced originally from the noted citrus enthusiast Tom McClendon, Citrumelo 'Dallas' is a cold-hardy hybrid between the rugged trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, and a grapefruit. From that unlikely pairing comes a vigorous small tree that carries the trifoliate's toughness and a good measure of grapefruit character in the fruit.
Citrumelo 'Dunstan' is a hardy heirloom hybrid of the rugged trifoliate orange, Citrus trifoliata, and the sunlit grapefruit, Citrus paradisi, and from that unlikely marriage comes a fruit and tree of real merit. The golden-yellow globes swell to nearly four inches across, fragrant, and, touched with sugar, carry the tart refreshment of a grapefruit picked a little shy of ripe. Here is fruit both rustic and refined, bred for survival yet still hinting at the orchard.
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.
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.
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.
'Desi Arnez' (Clinopodium georgianum hybrid) turned up as a chance seedling in the garden of Robert Mackintosh, a cross of uncertain parentage that Woodlanders judged worth keeping and worth introducing. The likeliest account is a quiet romance between Georgia savory (Clinopodium georgianum) and a neighboring false rosemary (Conradina), two southeastern natives that seldom bother to cross the line between their genera. Botanists who keep their Latin tidy now file the result under the bigeneric name ×Clinadina, which is roughly how the field admits it never saw the match coming.
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.
This one comes with a paper trail. 'Illustris' was first described in 1873 by William Bull, the Chelsea nurseryman, who listed the plant as Alocasia illustris in his catalogue of new and rare plants and sold them out of his glasshouses at 536 King's Road. Nobody knows quite where they came from. Colocasia esculenta is a restless, variable species, and Bull had rivers of tropical material moving through the place, so the likeliest story is that he caught a dark-leaved sport among the green, liked what he saw, and kept dividing the stock. Every 'Illustris' in cultivation descends from that one Victorian decision. A 150-year-old clone, still in production.
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.
Japanese cedar is a tall, pyramidal to conical evergreen conifer, and the great timber tree of Japan, where the sugi soars past a hundred feet and lines temple avenues and mountain forests alike. The blue-green needles are held close and awl-shaped, taking on a bronzy, purple-bronze cast through cold winters before recovering their color in spring. The reddish-brown bark peels in long fibrous strips down a straight, buttressed trunk.
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.
