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.
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.
‘Amber Blush’ is a soft-toned selection of the native scarlet calamint, Clinopodium coccineum, an aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family from the deep sands of the southeastern coastal plain. Where the wild species flowers in hot scarlet, this clone brings a gentler and more complicated color to the same tough, hummingbird-visited plant: bright yellow washed with orange, deepening toward amber.
'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.
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.
A small, slow Japanese cedar that flushes the color of cold lemonade in spring, pale, almost translucent yellow, then settles into soft chartreuse through summer. The foliage stays juvenile throughout, fine and feathery rather than the awl-shaped scale of a mature Cryptomeria, which gives 'Lemonade' a softer presence than most gardeners expect of a conifer. This is texture you can run a hand through.
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.
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
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
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.
'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.
Callicarpa formosana, the Taiwan beautyberry, is a handsome deciduous shrub that lines the stems with vivid purple berries in fall, the clusters glowing against the fading leaves for strong late-season color. Native to Taiwan and southern China, the Taiwan beautyberry is built for warm climates and keeps a fuller, more robust frame than the smaller Asian beautyberries.
An evergreen bottlebrush with arching to pendulous branches and dark green, lance-shaped leaves, Callistemon paludosus carries terminal, pink bottlebrush spikes freely in midsummer, an unusual color in a genus mostly given to red. Relatively cold-hardy for a bottlebrush, this is a graceful, easy shrub for a hot, sunny spot.
