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.
Ilex integra is the holly for people who do not think they like hollies, an evergreen tree from Japan whose leaves carry no spines at all. The dark green foliage is smooth-edged, glossy, and thick, giving a clean, almost magnolia-like calm, and on female trees the show comes in fall and winter, when bright red berries gather along the branches against the deep green.
This low shrub with tiny evergreen leaves grows in moist peaty sand in the southern pine flatwoods from South Carolina to Florida and Alabama. The pink summer flowers may be needed to convince some people that this is indeed a Kalmia. It is a charming little shrub for a moist but well-drained sandy acid soil in the sun or semi shade. Care must be taken to insure it is not overtopped or overwhelmed by competing vegetation.
Lagerstroemia limii is the crepe myrtle almost nobody grows, and that is precisely the reason to seek the plant out. Rare in gardens and known mostly to breeders and botanic collections, this Chinese species trades the familiar look of the summer crepe myrtle for something bolder and stranger: broad, blue-green leaves far larger than those of the common sort, and open, pyramidal panicles of lavender-pink bloom carried through the warm months.
Sweetbay magnolia is one of the loveliest and most useful of the native magnolias, a tree of moist and swampy ground across the eastern United States from Massachusetts to Texas. The northern plants, Magnolia virginiana var. virginiana, are shrubby and deciduous; the southern, var. australis, grow into larger, evergreen trees. All share the sweetbay's gifts: leaves silvery white beneath that flash in the wind, and creamy, intensely fragrant flowers with a clean lemon scent.
Morella pumila is the dwarf waxmyrtle, a low, native evergreen that keeps everything gardeners love about the common wax myrtle, aromatic foliage, waxy berries, and a tough constitution, and shrinks it all to knee height. Native to the frequently burned pinelands of the southern United States, the plant is an adaptation to that fiery world, staying small and spreading slowly into dense patches and colonies by underground runners.
The olive is an evergreen Mediterranean tree, sometimes a very large shrub, with narrow leathery leaves gray-green above and silver beneath, and small fragrant white flowers carried in axillary racemes in late summer. Fruit ripened in dry climates is the source of commercial olives and olive oil. In the humid Southeast the olive has never been a dependable fruit producer, whatever the winter hardiness, and the honest advice is to grow one here for the silver evergreen structure and treat any crop as a bonus. There is now a commercial grove in south Georgia, so perhaps a suitable variety has been found, though the University of Georgia's own assessment of adaptability and productiveness in the state remains carefully undecided.
The olive is an evergreen Mediterranean tree or large shrub, the narrow leathery leaves gray-green above and silver below, the flowers small, white, and fragrant in axillary racemes in late summer. Where summers are dry, that fruit becomes table olives and oil. Where summers are wet, as here, the crop is unreliable and the tree earns a place for other reasons entirely: for the color of the foliage in low light, for the character an old trunk develops, and for the fact that an olive in a Carolina garden is still an unlikely and pleasing thing. A commercial grove has gone in down in south Georgia, which is encouraging, though the University of Georgia is still calling the question open.
The olive is an evergreen Mediterranean small tree or large shrub with grey-green leathery leaves and small, fragrant white flowers in axillary racemes in late summer. Fruit produced in dry climates is the source of commercial olives and olive oil. While the species is generally winter hardy in the warmer parts of the southeastern United States, the olive has not been a dependable fruit producer in our humid climate, and has never been readily available in the South. There is now a substantial commercial grove in south Georgia, so perhaps a suitable variety has been found; the question is more open than it was twenty years ago.
Phoebe cavaleriei is a broadleaved evergreen of the laurel family, and one of the handsomest of them. The leaves are leathery, four to seven inches long, oblanceolate to obovate, deep glossy green above and a pale greenish white beneath, so the whole canopy changes color as the wind turns the foliage over. Crushed, the leaves give off a pleasant spicy scent, which is the family signature and the reason bay, cinnamon, and sassafras all count as cousins. The bark is reddish brown with fine longitudinal striations while the young branches stay green. Flowers come between May and July, yellow to yellowish white and barely an eighth of an inch long, followed by round fruits about half an inch across seated in persistent tepals. Nobody grows this tree for the flowers.
Pinckneya is a large shrub or small deciduous tree with showy pink flowers that are not flowers at all. What carries the colour is a single enlarged sepal on some of the blooms, expanded into a soft rose-pink blade three or four inches long, so a tree in full display looks convincingly like a poinsettia that has escaped into a Georgia bog. The true flowers are smaller, greenish-yellow, tubular, and easy to overlook beside the bracts. The leaves are oval and four to five inches long, and the whole plant is loose and open rather than dense.
Pithecoctenium cynanchoides, the monkey's comb, is a vigorous, tendril-climbing vine of the trumpet-creeper family, Bignoniaceae, native to the warm woodlands and thickets of South America. Semi-evergreen in mild climates, the vine climbs by many-branched tendrils and clothes a support quickly in heart-shaped, three-parted leaves, the terminal leaflet often turned into a grasping tendril of its own.
'Chapmanii Wonder' is an uncommon and rewarding evergreen rhododendron, the offspring of an inspired cross made by a Japanese breeder between two very different parents. From the endangered Florida native Chapman's rhododendron, Rhododendron chapmanii, the plant inherits broadleaf evergreen foliage and Deep South heat tolerance; from the hardy white-flowered form of Rhododendron dauricum, a species of northeastern Asia, the plant takes cold hardiness and early bloom. The species name dauricum points to Dauria, the region of southeastern Siberia where that parent grows wild, while chapmanii honors Alvan Wentworth Chapman, the nineteenth-century botanist of the Southern flora.
If you already grow a camellia, a stewartia, or a Franklinia, you know most of what a Schima is trying to be. The genus sits in the tea family, evergreen where the American members are deciduous, and carries the family flower in the purest form the family manages: five white petals cupped around a dense boss of gold stamens, two inches or so across, fragrant, and scattered through the crown in summer rather than delivered all at once. Schima remotiserrata is a southeast Chinese species, native to Fujian, Guangdong, eastern Guangxi, southern Hunan, and Jiangxi, and almost unknown in American gardens; the epithet refers to the leaf margin, toothed at intervals rather than continuously, which is the field character that separates this species from a shelf full of near relatives.
Gesneriads are supposed to be houseplants. Somebody should tell Sinningia sellovii, which comes out of a hard woody tuber the size of a fist, throws arching stems three or four feet long, hangs them with scarlet tubular flowers from early summer until frost, and then dies back to the ground and does the whole thing again the following year in USDA zone 7b. Gardeners who know the family only through florist gloxinias tend to find this genuinely disorienting, which is a good reason to grow the plant near the front gate.
Here is a tree almost nobody in American horticulture has grown, and the reason is not that the plant is difficult. Sinoadina racemosa is simply obscure: a deciduous member of the madder family ranging from northern Myanmar and Thailand through southern China, Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands, and into Japan, running fifteen to forty feet tall with grey trunk bark and smooth young branches. In summer the tree carries small flowers packed tight into spherical heads, the heads themselves gathered into open terminal panicles, which is exactly what the epithet racemosa is pointing at.
Beaked stewartia is one of the rarest plants in a genus that has no common members, and we are indebted to Roger Gossler of Oregon for our stock. He calls the species one of the rarest Stewartias, grown above all for the large maroon calyx that closes around the seed pods once the flowers have fallen. "Very beautiful," he says, and Gossler has grown more stewartias than most gardeners will ever see. In the garden the plant makes a deciduous, multi-stemmed shrub or small tree, pyramidal while young and rounding into an oval with age, reaching anywhere from thirteen to thirty-odd feet depending on how patient the gardener turns out to be.
This small tree of Chinese origin has showy white flowers and fall foliage that is red or reddish, and the smooth whitish trunks with exfoliating bark are an important ornamental feature. In truth the bark is the reason most people plant one. Old stems shed in thin plates to leave a polished, mottled surface in cream, buff, and cinnamon that looks best in winter when nothing distracts from it, and improves every year for decades. The flowers arrive in early summer, white and cupped, about two inches across with a central boss of yellow stamens, unmistakably the work of a relative of Camellia. Then autumn brings a clean red. Very few small trees do three distinct things this well.
Tagetes lucida is the herb that does it all. Known as Mexican tarragon, Mexican mint marigold, pericón, and, in the old Aztec tongue, yauhtli, this fragrant perennial from Mexico and Central America earns every name. The narrow, glossy, deep-green leaves carry a warm anise-tarragon scent and flavor, and in late summer and fall the plant scatters small, single, golden-yellow marigold flowers across a tidy foot-and-a-half mound.
A splendid large deciduous or semi-evergreen shrub producing very large "snowball" globes of sterile flowers which are first green and then white giving a great show in late spring. Allow ample space in sunny to semi shady location with good, well-drained soil. Native to China and a great Viburnum for the South.
