Smooth sumac is a bold, colony-forming native shrub of the eastern and central United States, in time reaching the scale of a small tree, and one of the finest plants going for a hot, dry, sunny site where little else will thrive. The long, pinnately compound leaves give an almost tropical texture through summer, and the plant spreads by root suckers into broad, picturesque colonies, or can be held to a single tree-like specimen where the suckers are controlled.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun
Height
9–15 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Staghorn sumac is a bold native shrub or small tree of the northeastern United States and Canada, growing fifteen to thirty feet on stout, forking stems clothed in fine velvety hairs, the texture and antler-like branching that give the plant the name. The big, pinnate leaves are bright green through summer and turn a spectacular blend of yellow, orange, and red in fall, one of the great autumn shrubs of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–30 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Rohdea japonica, the sacred lily or Nippon lily, is a bold, slow, tufted evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage, and this selection carries the darkest leaves of all, an almost black, glossy green that anchors a shaded planting through the whole year and lights up a winter landscape when little else holds. Rather sizeable red berries ripen in tight clusters, half-hidden at the base of the leaves, a quiet second season for anyone who looks closely.
The double white Lady Banks rose is a true heirloom of Southern gardens, the kind of rose a grandmother trusted and passed along over the fence. Unlike most roses, this one asks for little and gives a great deal. Nearly thornless, the long green canes climb with ease, spilling over fences, arbors, and old farm gates as they have for generations.
Of all the plants that carry Sir Joseph Banks's name, and there are a great many, this rose carries his wife's. Banks was the most powerful botanist of his age: president of the Royal Society, the man who effectively built Kew, who had sailed with Cook to the far side of the world. When a thornless climbing rose came west out of the Chinese gardens, it was named not for him but for Dorothea, Lady Banks. The white double arrived first, collected at Canton in 1807. This one, the yellow, followed in 1824, carried back by the plant hunter John Damper Parks by way of the Calcutta botanic garden, an old Chinese garden form that had been grown and selected for generations before any Englishman set eyes on it.
Rosa 'Louis Philippe' came into the world in 1834 at Angers, France, raised by the rosarian Modeste Guérin and named for the man then on the throne, Louis Philippe, the Citizen King. His blood was royal in a second sense. Guérin is said to have bred him from 'Slater's Crimson China', one of the handful of repeat-blooming China roses that had reached Europe a generation earlier and overturned everything Western gardeners thought a rose could do. That rose had grown in Empress Joséphine's garden at Malmaison and been painted there by Redouté, and cuttings of its line found their way to Guérin's bench. This was a fashionable, well-connected rose, bound for the gardens of the European elite.
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Nearly every rose in your garden that blooms more than once a year owes a debt to this one. 'Old Blush' is a China rose, bred in China for something close to a thousand years and known there as the monthly pink, and they are generally reckoned the first East Asian rose to reach Europe, recorded in Sweden by 1752 and offered in England as Parson's Pink China in 1793. They brought with them the one thing Western roses simply did not have: the habit of blooming again and again across the season rather than once and done. Crossed into the old European roses, that single trait rewrote the genus. On the Ile Bourbon they met an autumn damask and produced the Bourbons; in Charleston, just down the road, the rice planter John Champneys crossed them with a musk rose and produced the first Noisette, the only rose class born in the American South. Bourbons, Noisettes, hybrid perpetuals, and in time the hybrid teas all trace back through this unassuming pink shrub. 'Old Blush' could have retired on the legacy and instead just kept flowering. In the South they are very nearly everblooming, throwing clusters of soft semi-double pink that, in the China way, deepen rather than fade in the sun, blush going to rose as each flower ages. The canes are nearly thornless, the constitution famously tough; these are the roses you still find blooming alone at abandoned homesteads, having outlived the house and the gardener both. Grow them for the flowers. Know that you are also growing the root of the whole modern family.
Rosemary is a timeless classic in both the garden and the kitchen, an aromatic evergreen shrub of the sun-baked Mediterranean coast, so distinctive that botanists long kept rosemary in a genus apart, Rosmarinus officinalis, before recent study moved the herb into the sages as Salvia rosmarinus. The old genus name means dew of the sea, for the plant's love of bright, salt-swept coastal hillsides. Slender, needle-like, deep green leaves clothe the woody stems the year round, and soft blue flowers open along them from winter into spring.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
Rudbeckia fulgida var. fulgida is the true orange coneflower, the wild species that stands behind the famous 'Goldsturm', quieter, finer, and later to bloom than that celebrated garden child. From a low clump of dark, roughly hairy leaves rise branching stems two to three feet tall, each ending in a small golden daisy about two inches across, the deep yellow rays set around a low dome of brown-black. Where many of the black-eyed Susans have blazed and faded by August, the orange coneflower is only getting started, carrying many small flowers from late summer well into October.
Rhaphiolepis umbellata is the hardiest of the Yeddo hawthorns, an evergreen member of the rose family (Rosaceae) that grows wild on the sea cliffs and coastal thickets of Japan and Korea. The genus name joins the Greek raphis, a needle, with lepis, a scale, a nod to the narrow bracts beneath the flower clusters, while the species epithet umbellata describes the way the blossoms gather into rounded, umbel-like heads. Western gardeners know the shrub as Indian hawthorn, a slightly misleading name, since the plant hails from East Asia rather than the subcontinent and is no true hawthorn at all.
'Great Balls of Fire' belongs to the celebrated line of Aromi azaleas, the life's work of Dr. Eugene Aromi, a University of South Alabama education professor who set out in the late 1960s simply to help the azaleas in his Mobile front yard survive the Gulf Coast's brutal heat and humidity. What began as a backyard experiment grew into one of the great American breeding programs. From 1971 onward Aromi crossed cold-hardy Exbury and Knap Hill azaleas with tough southern native species, chief among them the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chasing large, fragrant, heat-proof deciduous flowers. He made more than a thousand crosses and raised over fifty thousand seedlings before his death in 2004, and roughly a hundred of the best were named. This is counted among them.
Sunbow Solar Flare is the patented name for the azalea catalogued as Rhododendron 'QbackB' (U.S. Plant Patent 27,083), a deciduous native hybrid bred for the very conditions that defeat most azaleas. The plant traces to a deliberate cross made in 1984 by Robert Edward Lee in Folsom, Louisiana, who set out to combine the fragrance and vivid color of the Gulf Coast's own Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, with the substance of the Exbury hybrids. A seedling from austrinum open-pollinated with the hybrid 'Gibraltar' was crossed onto 'Chetco', and from that union Lee selected this standout in 1990.
'Aromi Sunrise' is a deciduous azalea from the storied breeding program of Dr. Eugene Aromi, the University of South Alabama professor who spent decades teaching heat-shy azaleas to flourish along the Gulf Coast. Introduced in 1987, this hybrid marries the bold Knap Hill azalea 'Hiawatha' with the native Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, so the plant inherits both the size and clarity of the English strains and the toughness and fragrance of a southern wildflower. The result is exactly what Aromi chased across more than a thousand crosses: a large-flowered, sweet-scented, heat-tolerant azalea for gardens where the classic mountain sorts fail.
'Aromi Sunstruck' is one of the deciduous azaleas raised by Dr. Eugene Aromi, the Mobile educator whose decades of patient hybridizing gave the Deep South a whole race of heat-tolerant azaleas. Beginning in the late 1960s, Aromi crossed the large, brilliant Exbury and Knap Hill strains with hardy southern natives, above all the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, to win big, fragrant flowers on shrubs that could take Gulf Coast summers. He described more than fifty thousand seedlings over a lifetime of work and named only the finest hundred or so; 'Aromi Sunstruck' carries that pedigree of selection.
Rhododendron alabamense, the Alabama azalea, is one of the loveliest and, by wide agreement, one of the most powerfully fragrant of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Southeast. The species grows in hardwood forests and along dry slopes and ridges from north-central Alabama east through western Georgia and into South Carolina, where in mid spring the woods fill with the scent of lemon. Clusters of six to ten white, funnel-shaped flowers, each marked with a clear yellow blotch and finished with long, arching stamens, open just before or alongside the emerging leaves. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek, while azalea derives from azaleos, meaning dry, a nod to the well-drained upland ground these shrubs favor.
Rhododendron arborescens, the sweet or smooth azalea, is one of the hardiest and most graceful of the native white azaleas, a tall, loosely branched deciduous shrub of the eastern mountains and piedmont. The common name smooth azalea points to the hairless, glossy twigs and leaves that set the species apart from woollier kin, while sweet azalea speaks to the flowers, which pour out a rich heliotrope perfume. The species epithet arborescens is Latin for becoming tree-like, a fair description of an old plant that can reach ten to eighteen feet, and the genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek.
Rhododendron atlanticum, the coastal or dwarf azalea, is a low, colony-forming native of the open pine woods and sandy flatwoods of the mid-Atlantic and Carolina coastal plain. Unlike the tall wild azaleas of the mountains, this species stays close to the ground, often no higher than the knee, and spreads by underground runners, or stolons, into broad, drifting colonies. The bluish, glaucous foliage is a hallmark, cool and sea-gray, and the species name atlanticum simply marks the plant's home along the Atlantic seaboard. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek; azalea comes from azaleos, meaning dry, a fitting root for a shrub of sandy, well-drained ground.
This fragrant deciduous azalea is a garden cross between two native species, the low, glaucous-leaved coast azalea, Rhododendron atlanticum, and the golden Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum. From the first parent the hybrid inherits sweet fragrance and cool foliage; from the second, warmth of color and vigor. The result, selected here for pale, clear yellow flowers, blends the best of both, and where the ranges of the two species meet along the Southern coastal plain, such crosses occasionally arise in the wild as well.
