Stewartia malacodendron is a much sought native deciduous shrub. It is in the Tea Family so related to Camellia. It is found mostly on streamside slopes in rich woods and is widely scattered in spots from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas. It has beautiful white flowers like a single rose but with purple staymens. If it were easy to grow it would be a standard landscape plant and not a special sought-after connoisseur plant. It is happy in the garden once established in neutral to slightly acid sandy soil with good drainage, adequate moisture, and shade from hot afternoon sun.
Upright deciduous tree ultimately medium sized. Abundant small white flowers and attractive cinnamon colored bark make this a desirable ornamental. Generally easier to grow than other Stewartias. (See DIR)
We are indebted to Roger Gossler of Oregon for this plant. He describes it as one of the rarest Stewartias, with a large maroon calyx that will surround the seed pods. ãVery beautifulà, he says.
This small tree of Chinese origin has showy white flowers and fall foliage that is red or reddish. The smooth whitish trunks with exfoliating bark are an important ornamental feature. It is a plant for moist but well-drained acidic soil in sun or half shade. To 15 to 25 feet. Dirr, Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, says: "....a delightful small landscape plant that should be more widely used." and: "Hardy to Boston and should be pursued by discriminating gardeners."
American snowbell is one of the quiet delights of the Southeastern wetlands, usually a graceful multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, though the plant can be trained up into a small single-trunked tree. Along streamsides and in low, wet ground from the coastal plain through the interior South, the shrub carries slender branches that hang, in spring, with rows of small, bell-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant and nodding on fine stalks so the whole plant seems trimmed in tiny lanterns.
Styrax obassia, the fragrant snowbell, is the bold-leaved cousin of the more familiar Japanese snowbell, a small deciduous tree from the mountain woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China. Where Styrax japonicus hides small bells beneath fine, layered branches, the fragrant snowbell wears large, rounded, almost tropical leaves up to eight inches across, and hangs long, drooping chains of white, bell-shaped flowers that carry a sweet perfume through the late-spring garden.
In the open oak-hickory woodlands and fire-maintained savannas that once covered the upland South, Georgia aster was a fixture, a late-season native sending up violet-blue flowers in October and November at the precise moment when almost everything else had finished. That landscape is largely gone now, and the aster went with most of it.
A native aster with a regional accent. Most of the asters Americans plant are wide-ranging species that turn up from Maine to Texas and read essentially the same wherever they grow. Symphyotrichum grandiflorum is more particular, with a native range small and specific: the Atlantic Coastal Plain of Virginia and the Carolinas, plus the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and little more. A few hundred miles of sandy roadsides, dry pine-oak woods, abandoned fields, and forest edges from the Tidewater into the rolling country west of the fall line. For a gardener in the Carolinas or Georgia, this is one of the few asters that is genuinely here, a piece of the actual Atlantic Coastal Plain flora rather than a borrowed prairie species filling in for a missing native.
Syringa meyeri 'Palibin', the dwarf Korean lilac, is a Southern-friendly lilac with old-world charm and clouds of spring fragrance. For gardeners who have long admired the lilac's perfume but found themselves too far south to grow one with confidence, this compact deciduous shrub offers the romance of the traditional lilacs, dense clusters of icy-pink to pale lavender bloom, without the northern fussiness.
