The Japanese clethra is grown for bark as much as bloom. Clethra barbinervis is a tall, tree-like deciduous shrub or small tree from the mountains of Japan and Korea, carrying somewhat fragrant terminal racemes of white flowers in summer, in the same sweet-scented family as the native summersweets. But the real distinction is the bark: smooth and polished, gray to warm brown, and exfoliating in age to a handsome patchwork that makes this one of the finest small trees for the winter garden.
Most of the summersweets drop their leaves and sleep through winter; Clethra pringlei keeps them. This Mexican member of the clan is a broad-leaved evergreen, a large, slow-growing shrub or small tree from the mountain woodlands of northeastern Mexico, and one of the more surprising plants in the genus for a gardener who knows only the deciduous American kinds.
Clethra alnifolia and the southern Clethra tomentosa are stoloniferous deciduous shrubs commonly called Summersweet or Sweet Pepperbush. They form colonies in moist acid soil and make good garden subjects. They are valued for their terminal spikes of fragrant white flowers in summer. Plant in sun or semi-shade and provide adequate moisture. This clone of the southern species has light colored backs of leaves and amazing flower racemes up to 16 inches long! This Woodlanders introduction is a plant we selected from the wild in the Florida Panhandle. It was the highest rated Clethra clone tested in trials at Longwood Gardens. Clethra tomentosa is native to the southern U.S.
The summersweets are among the most fragrant of American shrubs, and the southern woolly summersweet, Clethra tomentosa, carries the whole tribe's gifts: colonies of upright stems in moist, acid ground, and terminal spikes of white flowers that pour a honey-and-clove perfume across the July garden. Country people knew the plant as Sweet Pepperbush, for the peppercorn seed heads, and the crushed flowers even raise a soft lather once used as a woodland soap.
Cleyera japonica was for generations placed in the tea family, the Theaceae, alongside camellia and tea themselves, and the resemblance still reads in the glossy, leathery, deep green leaves. Later molecular study moved the genus out of that family and into the Pentaphylacaceae, so the old tea-family listing has since been dropped, though the kinship of appearance remains. In the plant's native Japan the species carries a sacred weight few garden shrubs can claim: this is the sakaki, written with a character that fuses the signs for tree and for god, and the branches are cut for tamagushi, the leafy wands offered at Shinto shrines for blessing and purification. Small, sweetly scented cream flowers open in early summer, followed by berries that ripen from red to black.
Cliftonia monophylla 'Berry Pink' is a rare, pink-flowered selection of the Black Titi, a native evergreen shrub or small tree of the southeastern coastal plain that normally blooms in white. The species haunts the acid bogs, pond margins, and titi swamps from the Carolinas to the Gulf, where the early flowers make the buckwheat tree one of the first and most important nectar sources of the southern year, the source of the prized titi honey.
Clinopodium coccineum is a small, aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family, native to the deep, well-drained sands of the southeastern coastal plain, from Mississippi and Georgia down into Florida. The loose, open frame and small, spicy-scented leaves would earn a quiet place on their own, but the flowers are the event: showy scarlet tubes carried over a long summer season, held out like little trumpets that hummingbirds cannot resist.
'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 apricot clone brings a gentler, more complicated color to the same tough, hummingbird-loved plant.
Clinopodium coccineum 'Ohoopee Yellow' wears a contradictory name, since this is a clear, bright yellow-flowered form of a mint shrub that usually blooms in scarlet. The yellow form was originally shared with us by Ken Wurdak, who found the plant in Tattnall County, Georgia. We later lost our stock and got the clone back from Mike Creel, who had received starts from us years before. Such are plant sagas.
Clytostoma callistegioides is one of those vines that feels as though the plant wandered out of an old botanical expedition: vigorous, evergreen, and brimming with the sort of charm collectors once crossed oceans to find. A close relative of our native crossvine (Bignonia capreolata), this South American cousin shares the same athletic climbing spirit but dresses in glossier, more refined foliage and carries larger flowers.
Colquhounia coccinea is a showy, soft-wooded shrub of the mint family, clothed in medium-sized leaves that are downy and pleasantly rough to the touch. Through late summer and fall come dense terminal spikes of orange-scarlet, yellow-throated flowers, a hot late-season color that hummingbirds and pollinating insects work eagerly. Plant in a sunny, well-drained site with good soil, where the arching stems can be trained against a warm wall.
The conradinas are dense, aromatic, low shrubs of the mint family, dressed in small, usually needle-like green or gray leaves and hung with little pale purple flowers. Six or seven species grow wild in the southern United States, most of them in Florida on sand or very sandy soil, and all but this one (and one possibly new species) are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Conradina canescens is the common, widespread member of the clan, a somewhat variable plant of the Gulf Coast dunes of northwest Florida and adjacent Alabama.
This small to medium shrub is in the mint family. It is a small shrub with gray-green narrow Rosemary-like aromatic leaves. The flowers are bluish and larger than other Conradinas. It is native on old dunes and deep sandy soil at scattered locations along the east coast of Florida. It needs a sunny site with well-drained sandy soil. Conradina grandiflora is a federally listed endangered species. NOT FOR SALE IN INTERSTATE COMMERCE
Some years ago we introduced two selections of Conradina collected on the Styx River in southern Alabama, called 'Low Gray' and 'Low Green', and we hope those clones survive in cultivation somewhere still. On a return visit to the Styx River site we gathered several more cuttings from distinctly low-growing plants. This conradina haunts a sandy woodland and cutover near the Styx River, and may well represent a new, as yet undescribed species; what appears to be the same plant turns up some miles east on Blackwater State Forest in northwest Florida. The Styx River plant differs clearly from the taller, more upright Conradina canescens of the open Gulf Coast.
A small shrub of the Cumberland Plateau, found only on the flood-scoured cobble and sand bars of three river systems in eastern Tennessee and a sliver of Kentucky: the Big South Fork of the Cumberland, the Caney Fork, and the Obed. The rest of the Conradina clan keeps to the sand scrub of Florida and the Gulf Coast of Alabama, sun-baked and semitropical. This species took a different path, north into the cooler uplands, and the cold-hardiness that came with the move is the gift to gardens farther north.
Coreopsis integrifolia, the Chipola River coreopsis, is a rare southeastern native that saves its show for the end of the season. When most of the summer flowers have gone over, this tickseed lifts deep golden-yellow daisies, each centered with a dark maroon eye, on slender stems well above the foliage, bringing fresh color to the fall garden. A choice and uncommon perennial, known in the wild from only a handful of counties, the plant is as valuable to the gardener as it is to the pollinators working late.
Native to the open prairies and meadows of North America, Coreopsis lanceolata, the lanceleaf coreopsis, has long been admired for bright, golden-yellow blooms and an easy, hardy nature. This perennial wildflower has been a staple of North American landscapes for a very long time, growing across a wide range of climates and soils, from sandy coastal ground to the rich prairies of the Midwest.
Coreopsis verticillata, the threadleaf coreopsis, is a clump-forming native perennial dressed in fine, thread-like foliage and covered through the long weeks of summer in small, bright yellow, daisy-like flowers. Native to the open woods and clearings of the eastern United States, threadleaf coreopsis has become one of the most popular of all garden perennials, an easy, airy, long-blooming plant for the sunny border.
There is a version of the flowering dogwood almost nobody has met. Cornus florida 'Suwanee Squat' was found in Suwannee County, Florida, by Bob Simons, a forest ecologist who spent half a century protecting the wild hardwood country of north Florida. As a young man in the early 1970s he walked a mixed-hardwood hammock outside Gainesville, decided the place was worth saving, and talked ten landowners and the state into making it San Felasco Hammock; that became the pattern of his life. A man who knew that kind of forest the way most of us know our own street is exactly the sort to notice a dogwood doing something a dogwood is not supposed to do. Woodlanders introduced his low, sprawling oddity to cultivation, and the plant has stayed scarce ever since, the kind of tree you mostly hear about secondhand from someone who saw one and never got over it.
Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood, is the beloved understory tree of the eastern North American woods, widely planted for the great show of white spring bracts (the true flowers are the small green knot at the center), and, in selections like this one, pink. A deciduous woodland tree that grows in moist, well-drained soil in sun or high, dappled shade, the dogwood rewards careful planting: set the root flare high, and never plant too deep.
