Penstemon digitalis is one of the most adaptable of the native beardtongues, a clump-forming perennial of moist meadows, prairies, and open woods across the eastern and central United States. 'Husker Red', selected at the University of Nebraska and named Perennial Plant of the Year in 1996, keeps all the toughness of the wild species but wears it in deep wine-red: a basal rosette of glossy maroon foliage that holds color from spring through fall.
Pistacia chinensis, the Chinese pistache, is a medium-sized deciduous tree and a close relative of the pistachio nut, though this species carries no crop for the table. What the tree offers instead is one of the finest autumn shows in the warm South: lustrous, dark green compound leaves that ignite, nearly all at once, into a fire of scarlet, orange, and red before they fall.
In Japan they call the shrub tobira, short for tobira no ki, the door tree, because the cut branches were hung in the doorway at Setsubun to turn back demons at the threshold of spring. The broken wood smells rank, which was rather the point: bad spirits, like most of us, would rather not walk through a bad smell. The genus name is kinder and more exact, pitta and sporos, pitch and seed, for the resin that coats the black seeds and glues them to whatever bird carries them off.
A refined and rarely offered evergreen from New Zealand, Podocarpus acutifolius forms a dense, finely textured silhouette of short, sharp-tipped leaves that give the plant a crisp, architectural presence. Heat-tolerant and well suited to the southern United States when properly sited, this uncommon conifer offers structure, restraint, and year-round depth in the landscape.
A conifer of mist and mountains, Podocarpus parlatorei comes from isolated cloud-forest ridges just east of the Andes in Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. Rare in the wild and scarcely seen in cultivation, this CITES-listed species is one of the most unusual evergreen introductions Woodlanders has ever offered.
For a plant this common, the Christmas fern carries an oddly specific origin for the name. The fern was christened, the story goes, by one John Robinson, a botany professor at the Peabody Academy in Salem, Massachusetts, sometime in the late 1800s, and set down for posterity in a 1923 volume with the irreproachable title The Fern-Lover's Companion. Robinson's reasoning was seasonal. When the other ferns of the eastern woods go brown and crisp at the first hard frost, Polystichum acrostichoides holds green straight through December, which made the plant the fern people cut for wreaths and mantels at Christmas. There is a second theory, quieter and harder to settle, that the name comes from the leaflets themselves: look closely and each pinna carries a small lobe at its base, an ear or a thumb, that gives the leaflet the outline of a Christmas stocking. Both camps are probably right.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Plant type
Fern
Traditional use
pain relief, respiratory support, digestive health
The English laurel is a large broadleaf evergreen shrub grown for bold, glossy foliage, spires of small white flowers, and, at times, small cherry-like red-to-black fruits. The species is variable, with a number of cultivated forms, and the plant is native to eastern Europe and Asia Minor.
If any native perennial could be said to hum, the honor would go to Pycnanthemum muticum. From mid to late summer the blunt mountain mint gathers a shimmer of broad, silver-frosted bracts at the top of every stem, and within them open dense heads of tiny pink-to-white flowers that draw an almost comic density of life: bees of every kind, wasps, butterflies, skippers, moths, and flies working the nectar from dawn to dusk. In a three-year Penn State study that monitored eighty-six species, no plant drew a greater number and diversity of pollinators.
Patrinia scabiosifolia 'Nagoya' is a tough, upright perennial from the meadows and grassy hills of East Asia, grown for airy, flat-topped heads of tiny golden-yellow flowers held high on wiry, branching stems. The species name scabiosifolia points to the deeply lobed basal leaves, which recall those of a scabious, and the whole plant reads as a chartreuse-gold answer to Queen Anne's lace, lending height and a see-through veil to a summer border. In Japan the species is one of the classic seven flowers of autumn, and 'Nagoya' is a garden selection prized for reliable, compact performance.
Small's beardtongue is one of the showiest and most obliging of the eastern native penstemons, a Southern Appalachian wildflower that carries tall spires of lavender-pink to rosy-purple tubular flowers in late spring and holds them for weeks. Each bloom is pale-throated and finely striped inside, a landing-strip for the bumblebees that work the flowers, and the whole plant rises from a handsome rosette of purple-veined foliage on reddish stems.
Wild blue phlox turned up in the Woodlanders catalog almost by insisting on it, growing in the woods around Aiken the way the plant has for as long as anyone can remember. We have watched these colonies for years, and taking this long to offer them is either a comment on our patience or on our woody bias. Possibly both.
Phlox pilosa, the downy or prairie phlox, is a native of open woods, prairies, and glades across much of the eastern and central United States, and 'Eco Happy Traveler' is one of the most rewarding garden selections, made for a spreading habit and a long run of clear rose-pink bloom. The soft, downy stems and narrow leaves give the plant the common name, and the whole low mat is topped in late spring by loose clusters of fragrant, five-petaled flowers.
Physostegia virginiana, the obedient plant, is a familiar native of moist meadows and streamsides across eastern North America, and 'Vivid' is the compact, richly colored selection that has become a garden standard. Upright spikes of deep rose-pink, tubular flowers rise on square, mint-family stems in mid to late summer, holding strong color into early fall when much of the border is fading.
Pieris ryukyuensis is the lily-of-the-valley shrub of the Ryukyu Islands, the warm archipelago that trails south from Japan toward Taiwan, and 'Temple Bells' is a choice selection of this heat-tolerant species. The glossy, slightly toothed evergreen leaves emerge a warm bronze and mature to deep green, giving a polished, year-round presence on a dense, rounded frame of three to six feet.
Piloblephis rigida, wild or Florida pennyroyal, is a compact evergreen native mint from the sandy scrublands and pine flatwoods of Florida. The plant forms a low, tidy mound of fine, needle-like foliage that carries a clean, resinous, minty fragrance, released at a brush of the hand or on a warm afternoon in the sun.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Podocarpus macrophyllus, the yew pine, is a familiar evergreen conifer grown as a shrub or small tree across the southern United States, valued for dense, dark, strap-like leaves several inches long and a tidy, upright frame. 'Okina' is the variegated form, a relatively recent introduction from Japan, whose new growth emerges creamy white before settling to soft green.
This low-growing form of Podocarpus macrophyllus is a compact, spreading evergreen with flat, needle-like leaves that spiral tightly around the stems. Where the ordinary yew pine climbs into an upright shrub or small tree, this selection stays low and horizontal, building a dense, glossy green mat of steady year-round texture and structure.
A spring-blooming native of the eastern woodlands, found from Ontario and Quebec south through the Appalachians and as far west as Minnesota and Oklahoma, growing on rich deciduous forest floors, along streambanks, and at the bases of sandstone canyons. Polemonium reptans is one of those native plants that rewards close attention. The leaves are pinnately compound, with seven to twenty-one paired leaflets running up each stem like the rungs of a ladder, the source of the common name, which gestures all the way back to the biblical Jacob and his dream of a stairway to heaven. The genus name is older still: Polemonium honors King Polemon of Pontus, an ancient Greek ruler with a side interest in herbalism.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications, general wellness
Poliomintha longiflora is one of the several aromatic plants that go by the name Mexican oregano, and one of the prettiest, a small evergreen shrub that flowers for months and seasons the pot besides. Slender, aromatic leaves clothe a rounded bush two or three feet high, and from spring well into fall the branches carry long, tubular flowers in soft lavender and pink, a steady supply of nectar in the heat when little else blooms.
Polygonatum odoratum 'Variegatum', the variegated Solomon's seal, is one of the most graceful of all shade perennials, an Old World cousin of the native Solomon's seals grown for luminous, cream-edged foliage on arching stems. Each lance-shaped leaf carries a soft green center rimmed and streaked in creamy white, and the new stems flush a warm rose before greening.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, digestive health, general wellness
