'Sea Spray' has long traveled under the name Fothergilla major, a tidy assumption the botanists have since complicated. Run through a flow cytometer, the plant turns out to be a hybrid, F. × intermedia, the meeting of mountain witch-alder (F. major) and the dwarf coastal F. gardenii, the little shrub Charleston's Alexander Garden sent across to England in the 1760s, in a genus already named for John Fothergill, the London physician who tried to grow half of America in a single garden. All of which makes the name, for once, honest. Most Sea Spray christenings are wishful; this one actually carries the coast in the blood.
Fothergilla gardenii is a small deciduous shrub, usually three to four feet tall, and a native of the southeastern coastal plain, where the plant haunts moist, peaty pinelands and bogs. A member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, and a close cousin of the witch-hazels themselves, dwarf fothergilla shares the family gift for honey-scented late-winter and spring bloom on bare or barely-leafed stems.
The native fothergillas were choice but scarcely available garden shrubs when Woodlanders first began to offer them back in 1980. This one, a hybrid of Fothergilla gardenii and F. major, was found by Dr. Michael Dirr at the Mt. Airy Arboretum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has since become the most widely grown fothergilla of all, and deservedly so.
