Fothergilla gardenii

This one is named for a doctor and a place. The epithet gardenii honors Alexander Garden, the Scottish physician who settled in Charleston in 1752 and was first to find this shrub, describe the species, and send a plant across to England, the same Garden the gardenia is named for, though this Carolina native may be the truer monument. (The genus belongs to his English correspondent Dr. John Fothergill, in whose garden the shrub later grew; the species is Garden's.) Their home is the southeastern coastal plain, the low acid country of bogs and pine savannahs from the Carolinas to the Florida panhandle and Alabama, scattered and never common, the kind of habitat that disappears quietly.

They are the dwarf of the genus, and the earlier to bloom. In spring, ahead of the leaves, the bare twigs set short white bottlebrushes, petalless, all stamen and honey scent, opening a little before the taller mountain fothergilla and among the first things the bees work when the season turns. Summer brings small, rounded leaves in the cool blue-green the species is known for, the selected forms bluer still. Then fall, when the whole low mound turns at once, orange and red and gold often on a single leaf, color out of all proportion to two feet of shrub.

They keep to their origins. Two to three feet, slow, mounding and suckering gently at the base into a tidy colony, and particular about water: acidic soil, steady moisture, sharp drainage, and no drought, which they tolerate far less gracefully than their upland cousin F. major. Give them the damp acid corner they came from and they ask for nothing else. Hardy well north into zone 5, and deer mostly leave them alone.

Worth knowing before you buy, anywhere: most of the dwarf fothergilla in the trade is actually Fothergilla × intermedia, the garden hybrid. This is the species itself, the small Carolina native Garden pulled from a coastal bog. A four-season shrub with a Charleston pedigree and a fall display that embarrasses plants twice the size.