Helianthus verticillatus is a sunflower you grow as much for the story as the flower, though the flower holds up on merit. The plainest field mark is the leaves: narrow, lance-shaped, and arranged in distinct whorls of three or four around the stem rather than in the usual opposite or alternate pairs, a tidy structural signature that names the plant and sets the species apart from every common sunflower. Tall and strong-stemmed, the plant rises six to ten feet and lifts open clusters of clear yellow, dark-centered flowers in late summer and early fall.
Among hellebores the Corsican is the architect. Stout pale green stems rise two to three feet and arch outward, clothed the whole length in leathery trifoliate leaves, each leaflet edged with hard spines that give the plant a distinctly holly-like bite. From midwinter into spring those stems finish in wide open clusters of nodding bowls, apple green to chartreuse, an inch and a half across, holding on the plant for weeks and often months and aging slowly to a soft parchment green rather than dropping.
The Lenten rose is not a rose at all, but a member of the buttercup tribe that happens to flower around Lent, in the raw weeks of late winter when the garden is otherwise bare. The blooms are nodding cups a couple of inches across, held just above the foliage in white, cream, pink, plum, and a smoky green, many of them freckled or veined at the throat. What look like petals are in fact sepals, which is the secret of the long show: rather than dropping in days, the flowers hold for weeks and age slowly to green, carrying color from late winter well into spring.
Heptacodium miconioides, the seven-son flower, is a large, fountain-shaped shrub or small tree that saves its best for the tail of the year, when most of the garden is winding down. In late summer, tiered clusters of small, fragrant, creamy-white flowers open in whorls of seven, the arrangement behind both the botanical and common names. Bees and butterflies work the late flowers gratefully, in a season when little else is on offer.
Red yucca is one of those plants that looks like architecture and behaves, in the best sense, like a weed, thriving on neglect while holding a clean sculptural shape all year. From a low rosette of slender, arching, blue-gray leaves, each edged with curling white threads, the plant throws tall, wiry flower wands to four or five feet through the warm months, hung with dangling tubular blooms in coral-pink to deep red. Hummingbirds find the flowers almost the moment they open, and the bloom carries from late spring well into fall.
Redwing is grown less for the flowers than for what follows them. Through the warm months this fast, twining, semi-woody climber carries loose clusters of small clear-yellow flowers along the stems, pretty enough in passing, but the real event comes after, when each pollinated bloom ripens into a bright red winged fruit, a samara built exactly like the spinning key of a maple. In quantity the red keys smother the vine and glow against the small, neat foliage, an unexpected and long-lasting display that few visitors can name.
Pineland hibiscus is the wilder, pricklier cousin among the native mallows, and all the more charming for a slightly untamed look. Through the summer the plant opens broad flowers several inches across in soft creamy yellow, each centered on a deep maroon eye, the classic hibiscus form scaled down and set on a low, spreading, bristly frame. The deeply lobed leaves are rough to the touch and the stems carry fine prickles, so the whole plant reads as a hardy native of open, sunny ground rather than a pampered border hybrid.
Hibiscus coccineus, the scarlet rose mallow or Texas star hibiscus, is a tall, dramatic perennial native to the wetlands and swamps of the southern United States. Rising on strong, upright stems to six or ten feet, the plant lifts great scarlet stars above the summer garden, an American native that looks every bit as exotic as any tropical hibiscus and proves far tougher.
Hibiscus coccineus 'Lone Star' is the pure white form of the scarlet rose mallow, and the change of color changes everything. Where the wild species blazes red, 'Lone Star' opens great five-pointed stars of clean, luminous white, five to seven inches across, glowing against deep green, finely cut foliage and all the more striking in the soft light of evening. The same tall, architectural native frame carries a cooler, more serene presence.
Hibiscus grandiflorus, the swamp rose mallow, is a magnificent native perennial of the southeastern United States, grown for enormous soft-pink blooms and broad, velvety, gray-green leaves. Rising to eight or ten feet on stout stems, the plant brings a lush, almost tropical presence to the summer garden, at home in a wetland but just as striking in an ordinary bed or beside a pond.
Hibiscus hamabo is a tall branching shrub reaching fifteen feet or more, wide and rounded, clothed in broad soft leaves that feel almost felted in the hand. Flowers come through summer in a clear light yellow, single and open-faced, five or six inches across, each one carrying a deep crimson blotch at the throat that pulls the eye straight into the center. Individual flowers last a day, as hibiscus flowers do, and are replaced steadily for weeks. Autumn brings a second act that catches most people by surprise: the leaves turn red before dropping, which is not something the genus is generally known for.
The name requires a brief clarification, and then we can move on to the more interesting parts. Hibiscus mutabilis has been called the Confederate rose since the nineteenth century, when the plant naturalized so thoroughly in the gardens of the American South that people assumed it belonged there. The plant does not. The species belongs to Hunan Province in China, where gardeners have grown the shrub for nearly three thousand years, where the flower serves as the emblem of Chengdu, a city known on its account as the City of Hibiscus, and where classical texts on materia medica describe the flowers and leaves in medicinal detail. The name stuck here out of regional habit rather than botanical or historical accuracy, and the plant is indifferent to the label.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
10–15 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support
Hibiscus mutabilis has been grown in Southern gardens for so long that many people assume the shrub is a native, though the species traces to southern China, where gardeners prized the flowers centuries before the plant traveled west. The species name mutabilis, meaning changeable, describes the wild trick of the ordinary Confederate Rose, whose blooms open white in the morning and deepen to pink and then rose-red by evening. 'Rubrum' skips the performance and commits: the single flowers arrive already a saturated rose-red and hold that one deep tone through the day rather than shifting. For gardeners who love the late-season drama of the Confederate Rose but want a single, unwavering color, 'Rubrum' is the selection to plant.
Hibiscus palustris is the northern, cold-hardy face of the American rose-mallows, a marsh dweller whose species name comes straight from the Latin palus, a swamp or marsh. Botanists today often fold the plant into Hibiscus moscheutos as a subspecies, but the old name still travels with the pink-flowered marsh plants of the Northeast, and gardeners know exactly which plant the name marks. Where many tropical hibiscus sulk at the first frost, this perennial dies cleanly to the ground each winter and returns from a woody crown, unfazed by zone 5 cold.
'Tosca' is the offspring of a rare and deliberate cross, a marriage of Hibiscus paramutabilis, the regal, large-flowered species of southeastern China, with Hibiscus syriacus, the familiar Rose of Sharon of countless summer gardens. From that union comes a woody shrub that carries the best of both parents: the scale and drama of the Chinese species and the toughness and reliability of the old dooryard favorite.
'Peppermint Flare' comes with a well-documented pedigree, which is rare for a hardy hibiscus. The plant arose as a sport, a spontaneous mutation, of the hibiscus 'Flare', a nearly sterile rose-mallow hybrid bred by Dr. Sam McFadden and released through the University of Florida. The Texas horticulturist Greg Grant spotted and selected the peppermint-striped form, and in 2010 the plant was named a Texas Superstar, the designation reserved for tough, proven performers in the Southern heat.
Holboellia coriacea is an evergreen twining vine from western China, glossy and leathery in the leaf, each one divided into three long leaflets held on a slender stalk so the whole plant hangs in layers rather than making a solid mat. In spring and early summer come clusters of small flowers, greenish white through to pale purple, and the scent is the surprise: intensely sweet and carrying, far out of proportion to flowers that most people walk straight past. Later, if the season and the siting are right, the vine produces the other trick, fat pinkish-purple pods shaped unmistakably like sausages, ripening into early winter.
Hosta 'Tardiflora' announces the best trait in the name itself: tardiflora means late-flowering, and this small Japanese hosta is very nearly the last of the tribe to bloom, lifting lavender flowers in fall when most hostas have already finished and begun to tire. The plant traces back to the wild Hosta longipes, the long-stalked giboshi of Japan's rocky mountain slopes, where the species clings to cliffs and streambanks; 'Tardiflora' is a distinct, late seedling form long grown as a garden plant in its own right.
Hosta yingeri is one of the more recent hostas to reach gardens and one of the most distinct, a species found only on a scatter of rocky islands in the Huksan Archipelago off the southwestern coast of Korea. The American plantsman Barry Yinger collected the plant on Taehuksan Island in 1985, and the botanist Samuel B. Jones formally named the species in 1989 in Yinger's honor. For a genus most gardeners associate with the woodlands of Japan, this Korean islander broadened the family map.
Hyalis argentea var. argentea is a plant that spends most of a growing season being mistaken for something else. The leaves are narrow, silver, and whorled along willowy upright stems, so the whole clump reads as an ornamental grass from any distance at all, and the effect is entirely convincing until the flowers open. Then the family shows: this is an aster relative, in the Asteraceae, and the flowers on the taller stems carry only a few ray florets each but are attractive in a spare, high-desert way that suits the foliage exactly. A sub-shrub or perennial to about three feet, clump-forming and modestly stoloniferous.
