Crocosmia 'Lucifer' is a vigorous, corm-forming perennial and one of the best summer plants for the southern garden, multiplying steadily in good, moist, neutral to acid soil in sun or light shade. Tall, arching spikes of brilliant red-orange, flame-colored flowers rise over the clump through early to midsummer, held above fans of pleated, sword-like green leaves.
Few native shrubs carry as much quiet history as Croton alabamensis, the Alabama croton, a rarity known in the wild from only a handful of counties along the Cahaba and Black Warrior rivers, where the shrub clings to dry, limestone bluffs. This is a plant of the Southern woodland edge, once more widespread and now treasured wherever a gardener can offer the Alabama croton a home.
Cryptomeria japonica is the sugi, the national tree of Japan, the conifer that lines the approach to the shrines at Nikko in avenues planted four centuries ago and still standing. The species makes a very large tree in time, which is exactly the problem for most gardens, and the reason the dwarf and compact selections have been collected so avidly. 'Barabits Gold' is one of the better ones: a small, dense, upright form whose ascending shoots break bright gold at the tips in spring and hold that colour well through the growing season, deepening toward bronze-green as the year turns.
This spiny, sprawling, half-vining shrub carries glossy evergreen leaves and a tangle of thorns. Sometimes classified as a Maclura and related to the native Osage orange, cockspur thorn ranges widely across eastern Asia and south to Australia, yet stays rare and little known in North America, familiar mostly to a few bonsai enthusiasts.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
15–30 ft.
Bloom
Green
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support, pain relief, reproductive health
This is the silvery blue-needled form of the China fir, and the color is the reason to choose it over the ordinary green. Needles are broad, flat, stiff, and sharply pointed, an inch or two long, arranged in spirals that read as flat sprays and holding a distinct glaucous blue that intensifies in good light. The frame is boldly pyramidal with tiered horizontal branching, reaching forty to sixty feet in cultivation here, considerably more in China. Old bark peels in long strips to reveal reddish brown beneath. Dead needles hang on inside the crown for a year or two, which some gardeners dislike and others regard as part of the character; either way, a China fir is never mistaken for anything else.
The Sago Palm is not a palm at all. Cycas revoluta belongs to the cycads, an ancient line of seed-bearing gymnosperms far closer to conifers than to any true palm, and the feathered crown is a case of convergent evolution rather than kinship. Cycads carried this same architecture through the age of the dinosaurs, which is part of what lends the Sago Palm such a primeval presence in a modern garden.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–10 ft.
Spread
5–8 ft.
Plant type
Cycad
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, heart support
Once thought lost to time and development, Cyrilla arida, known as Scrub Titi, is a botanical rarity with a story as striking as the summer bloom. The famed botanist J.K. Small first described this shrub in the early twentieth century from the desert-like scrub of central Florida. For decades the identity of Scrub Titi was debated and any wild presence uncertain, until a dedicated search led to rediscovery by Kenneth Wurdack and the Woodlanders team in Highlands County, Florida. That tiny remnant population may now be gone, and Cyrilla arida may no longer exist in the wild, which makes every plant in cultivation all the more precious.
Cyrilla parviflora, the Littleleaf Cyrilla, is a small, understated shrub that carries the quiet resilience of the southeastern wetlands. A close relative of the larger Cyrilla racemiflora, this plant offers a finer, more delicate presence, with slender glossy leaves and airy clusters of tiny white flowers.
Cyrilla parvifolia 'Small Leaf' is a rare, fine-textured native selection that we collected in Franklin County, Florida, prized for the distinctly small, evergreen leaves and the delicate, branching habit. Though sometimes grouped botanically with Cyrilla racemiflora, the more widespread Coastal Titi, this selection stands apart in both form and foliage, an easy standout in native and ornamental plantings alike.
Titi is one of the quiet workhorses of the southern wetland, an evergreen to semi-evergreen shrub or small tree that ranges farther than almost any other native of the region, from the coastal plain of southern Virginia down through Florida and west to eastern Texas. In the wild the plant haunts the edges of swamps, bays, and blackwater streams, standing in the wet, acid ground where few woody plants thrive, yet takes with surprising ease to ordinary garden soil.
'Graniteville' is a low, ground-hugging selection of Cyrilla racemiflora, the native Titi, and one of the more distinctive forms of a plant already known for variability. Where the species can build into a small tree, this Woodlanders introduction stays wide and knee-high, and the story behind the plant is a piece of local botanizing: we propagated 'Graniteville' from an almost prostrate individual found years ago on an eroded sandhills seepage slope near Graniteville, South Carolina, and the ground-hugging habit has held true ever since in cultivation.
