Persea borbonia, the redbay, is a handsome broadleaf evergreen native to the southeastern United States, ranging from coastal Virginia through Florida and west along the Gulf. A member of the laurel family and a close relative of the avocado, the redbay carries the same aromatic oils, and the glossy leaves have long been used in the southern kitchen much as bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) is, to season soups, stews, and gumbo.
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
Pseudolarix kaempferi, better known by the synonym Pseudolarix amabilis and the common name golden larch, is a rare, slow-growing deciduous conifer native to eastern China. Despite the name, the golden larch is not a true larch but the sole member of its own genus, Pseudolarix, prized for a graceful broad-pyramidal form, soft texture, and a brilliant golden fall color that rivals any maple or ginkgo.
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.
Few native plants look as improbable as the maypop. Passiflora incarnata, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast, opens intricate three-inch flowers of pale lavender and white, each ringed with a fringed corona of wavy filaments above a central column of stamens and styles. Spanish missionaries read the whole Passion of Christ into that structure, the corona for the crown of thorns, the five anthers for the wounds, the three styles for the nails, and gave the genus its devotional name. Common along field edges and roadsides from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, the vine climbs by curling tendrils or sprawls across open ground.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–25 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
Passiflora incarnata alba is the rare pure white form of the native maypop, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast. The flower keeps all the improbable structure of the species, an intricate three-inch bloom with a fringed corona above a central column of stamens and styles, but drained of every trace of lavender: white petals, white sepals, and a white corona, luminous and cool against the deep green foliage. The effect is a ghostly, refined version of a familiar roadside wildflower.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–15 ft.
Spread
3–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
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.
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
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
Polygonatum commutatum, the great or giant Solomon's seal, is a bold native perennial of the eastern North American woodlands, sending up tall, unbranched, gracefully arching stems clad in broad, oval, alternate leaves. From the leaf axils along the underside of each stem hang small, creamy-white, bell-shaped flowers, usually in pairs, in late spring and early summer.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
3–5 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
pain relief, digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
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
Before European settlement reshaped the eastern landscape, Prunus americana was a fixture at the forest edge: thicket-forming, thorny, and extravagantly beautiful in early spring when the plum covered itself in white flowers before the leaves had even stirred. The Lakota knew the plum as kañta, the Cherokee as gunasdv, and across dozens of nations from the Great Plains to the Appalachians the tree was considered a plant of genuine importance. The fruits were eaten fresh, dried into cakes, and worked into pemmican, the dense, calorie-rich mixture of dried meat, fat, and fruit that sustained people through long winters and longer journeys. The inner bark was used medicinally, and the dense, close-grained wood was worked into tools. This was not an ornamental plant in the minds of the people who knew it first. The plum was a resource, in the fullest sense.
A native plum with a longer human history than any other fruit in North America. Prunus angustifolia, the Chickasaw plum, also called Cherokee plum, sand plum, sandhill plum, or Florida sand plum depending on the part of the range you are standing in, was actively cultivated by Indigenous peoples across the southeastern and central United States long before European contact. The Chickasaw, Cherokee, and several other nations carried the species in their orchards and food gardens, dried the fruit for winter storage, and almost certainly moved the plant eastward through pre-Columbian trade networks from what botanists now believe to be the species' true origin further west. The species was so deeply associated with Indigenous cultivation by the time European naturalists arrived that the binomial angustifolia, narrow leaf, eventually displaced earlier names like P. chicasa in formal taxonomy, though the common names kept the tribal attribution. Kansas made the plant its official state fruit in 2022. Few American native fruits carry their human history this visibly.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–10 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, respiratory support
Prunus japonica, the Japanese bush cherry or Japanese almond-cherry, is a compact deciduous shrub grown for an early flood of delicate pink-to-white bloom. Wiry branches carry dense clusters of five-petaled flowers just as the leaves appear, wrapping the low, rounded frame in soft color in early to mid spring.
Prunus mume, the Japanese flowering apricot, is one of the most beloved of all winter-flowering trees, opening almond-scented blossoms in the depths of winter, from soft white to deep pink, on bare branches while the rest of the garden sleeps. In China and Japan the mei or ume has been celebrated in poetry and painting for well over a thousand years as a symbol of resilience and the turning of the year.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
18–25 ft.
Spread
12–18 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, general wellness
Prunus mume 'Peggy Clarke' is a selection of the Japanese flowering apricot, a medium-sized deciduous tree grown above all for showy, deeply fragrant blossoms that open in the depths of winter when few other trees are in flower. 'Peggy Clarke' bears rich rose-pink, double, cup-shaped flowers, ruffled and fragrant, crowded along the bare branches in late winter and early spring.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
12–15 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, general wellness
Ptelea trifoliata, the hop tree or wafer ash, is a unique and underappreciated native, a small, bushy deciduous tree of eastern and central North America. Highly adaptable, the plant takes dry, rocky ground as readily as moist, well-drained sites, which makes the hop tree a fine choice for naturalized landscapes, pollinator gardens, and woodland edges.
There are pomegranates grown for fruit, and pomegranates grown for flowers, and then there is 'Eight Ball', grown for sheer astonishment. Where the species bears globes the color of garnets, Punica granatum 'Eight Ball' ripens fruit so dark, round, and dusky that the pomegranates look dipped in coal, closer to the ball the cultivar is named for than to anything in the produce aisle. The color runs bone-deep: the fruit is so loaded with anthocyanin pigment that even the cambium beneath the bark shows purple.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–10 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, heart support, general wellness, topical applications
This is the pomegranate grown the old way, for the fruit. Punica granatum is a deciduous Middle Eastern shrub of narrow, glossy leaves and vivid orange-red flowers, followed by the large, leathery-skinned, garnet-seeded fruits for which the plant has been cultivated since antiquity. Woodlanders raised this particular selection from seed of a good fruiting specimen in upstate South Carolina, and the plant may well represent 'Wonderful', the widely grown commercial variety, proven here as a dependable cropper in the southern garden.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, heart support, general wellness, topical applications
Where blunt mountain mint is all broad silver, Pycnanthemum tenuifolium is the slender cousin, a fine-textured native built from wiry stems and narrow, almost needle-thin leaves. From midsummer into early fall the plant clouds over with flat-topped clusters of tiny white to pale lavender flowers, faintly purple-speckled, and the effect at a distance is a low haze of bloom. What the flowers lack in size they make up in draw: bees, small butterflies, wasps, and beneficial insects work the nectar in numbers that make narrowleaf mountain mint one of the most valuable pollinator plants of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, topical applications
