Few fruits carry the weight of centuries quite like the common fig. Ficus carica, native to the sun-soaked hills of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, has graced gardens and tables since biblical times, and no member of the tribe is more beloved in the American South than 'Celeste', the little fig so sweet that growers have long called the tree the Sugar Fig.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
8–15 ft.
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
The American beech is one of the great presences of the eastern woods, a large, slow-growing deciduous tree that ranges through rich forests from southern Canada to the Gulf. Toothed oval leaves, several inches long, emerge a clean bright green, turn clear yellow in fall and then a warm russet-brown, and cling to the branches through much of winter, a habit called marcescence that gives the bare woods a soft papery whisper. The trunk is the signature: smooth, silver-gray, and elephantine, so inviting that generations have carved their initials into the living bark, a temptation best resisted since the wounds never truly heal.
In the forests of the Himalayan foothills and across monsoon Asia grows a fig of ancient bearing, Ficus roxburghii, known to botanists today as Ficus auriculata and to gardeners as the elephant-ear fig. This is no dainty exotic. In the tropics the plant makes a bold small tree; in the American South, where hard frost cuts back the top, the fig returns from the root each year as a heroic perennial, with a presence as memorable as a live oak draped in Spanish moss.
Fortunella obovata 'Changshou' is the Changshou kumquat, the sweetest and most generous of the kumquat tribe, whose fruit swells to the size of a ping-pong ball, far larger than the little oval kumquats most people know. Round to gently obovate, ripening bright orange, that fruit is eaten whole, skin and all, the thin rind sweeter and more tender than any other kumquat's. A compact, dense, thornless evergreen, the Changshou is as pretty in a pot as it is productive.
This is the wild strawberry of eastern North America, Fragaria virginiana, the modest little groundcover that carpets sunny woodland edges, old fields, and roadside banks across the continent. Trifoliate, serrated leaves rise in low tufts, and slender runners reach out to root new plantlets at their tips, so that a single crown becomes a colony in a season or two.
