The yellowwoods are to South Africa roughly what the live oaks are to the Lowcountry: the tree everyone knows, the tree in the old photographs, the tree the furniture was made from. Afrocarpus falcatus, the Outeniqua yellowwood, is the tallest of them, a conifer of coastal and montane forest from the Eastern Cape north through Mozambique and Malawi, reaching thirty to sixty feet in cultivation and a great deal more in the deep forest at Tsitsikamma. The famous specimens live for centuries and carry trunks two or three feet through. Yellowwoods collectively are treated as South Africa's national tree, and cutting one is regulated by law.
Few vines work as hard for as little as the coral vine. Antigonon leptopus comes out of Mexico with heart-shaped leaves, tendrils that grab any small object within reach, and long sprays of small papery flowers in a hot, slightly unreasonable pink from midsummer until frost stops the show. The flowers are borne in such quantity that the whole plant seems to fizz, and the common names have piled up accordingly: coral vine, queen's wreath, Mexican creeper, chain of love, and, in the Gulf South, confederate vine. Bees find the plant before you do.
Baptisia alba, white wild indigo, is a striking native perennial of tall spires of white, pea-like flowers over deep blue-green foliage. Native to the eastern and central United States, the species carries a rich history as a dye plant, used by Native American peoples and early settlers as a substitute for true indigo, and the genus name, from the Greek bapto, to dip, records that role.
When Woodlanders began in 1980, this was about the only Baptisia known to gardeners; we went on to introduce many of the species that have since become popular garden perennials. Baptisia australis, blue wild indigo, is a long-lived native, essentially a prairie plant of open glades on limestone soil, with handsome olive-green compound leaves topped in spring by spikes of bright indigo-blue, pea-like flowers.
Called Philippine violet, though neither Philippine nor a violet, Barleria cristata is a showy subtropical shrub that saves its display for the close of the year, opening dark blue-violet, trumpet-shaped flowers through late summer and autumn when much of the garden is winding down. A perennial in zones 8 and 9 and a four-to-six-foot shrub in zone 10, native to India and Myanmar.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
24–30 in.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, pain relief, general wellness
On the deep Kalahari sands, where a hard year brings barely fourteen inches of rain, this bauhinia grows as a spreading, half-scrambling shrub, now and then gathering enough height to pass for a small tree at twenty feet. The leaves give the genus away at a glance: two rounded lobes joined at the base, the shape everyone calls a camel's foot or a cow's hoof, blue-green and leathery enough to shrug off a dry season. Then, in summer, the shrub opens flowers that look too large and too fine for the country they came from, five crinkled white petals with a fringed, almost torn edge, carried in flushes that run on into autumn. In Botswana and Zimbabwe the grey louries and the parrots come to eat them.
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
Of the thirty-odd bottlebrushes, this is the one Australian growers reach for when they want the word spectacular to mean something. Callistemon phoeniceus is endemic to the southwest corner of Western Australia, a hard, sandy, summer-dry country, and the shrub arrives in spring and summer carrying scarlet brushes four to six inches long, each one finished with a dark tip so the whole spike reads as red shading into near-black. The leaves are the other half of the appeal: thick, stiff, and distinctly blue-green, holding that cool grey cast right through the year, which makes the red land harder than red on ordinary green ever does.
The weeping bottlebrush is the one most Americans have already met without knowing the name, a small tree of crimson brushes and long hanging branchlets planted through Florida and the Gulf Coast until a hard freeze thins the ranks and somebody plants them again. In the wild Callistemon viminalis runs down the eastern edge of Australia from Cape York into northeastern New South Wales, and almost always along water: creek banks, seasonal channels, the damp sand beside a watercourse. That habitat explains the two things that set this species apart from the rest of the genus. The branches hang rather than stand, giving the whole tree a fountain habit that carries even out of flower, and the roots will tolerate heavier ground and less than perfect drainage, which almost no other bottlebrush will.
Most camellias are bought for the flower. This one is bought for the leaf, and anyone who has met the plant in person understands why within about four seconds. Camellia salicifolia carries long, thin, lance-shaped leaves that hang rather than sit, closer to a willow or a bamboo than to the stiff glossy ovals of a japonica, so the whole shrub moves in a breeze and reads soft where the rest of the genus reads architectural. New growth comes out coppery and silky, covered in fine hairs, and the young branchlets are villous enough to feel like felt between the fingers. Some growers call the species the willow-leaf camellia and some the Hong Kong camellia; both names point at something true.
Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen' is the trumpet vine at its most garden-worthy, a vigorous deciduous climber hung all summer with clusters of big, flaring, orange to salmon-red trumpets. The vine is a hybrid between the American trumpet creeper, Campsis radicans, and the Chinese Campsis grandiflora, combining the toughness of one parent with the refinement of the other. Raised in the nineteenth century by the Tagliabue brothers at their nursery near Milan, 'Madame Galen' has remained the favorite form of the cross ever since.
Leatherleaf is the quiet constant of the northern bog. Chamaedaphne calyculata, the only species in the genus, is a low, thicket-forming evergreen of the heath family that ranges right around the cold northern world, from the peatlands of North America east to the bogs of Finland and Japan, and southward in this country to the pocosins and acid bogs of the coastal plain, as far as South Carolina. Across that vast range, leatherleaf forms the dense, spreading colonies that hold a bog together and shelter the wildlife within.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and U.S. 119 is one of the most refined of the group. A complex USDA hybrid, a citrumelo crossed back with a sweet orange, the tree runs one quarter trifoliate orange, one quarter grapefruit, and one half sweet orange, a pedigree chosen to keep the toughness of the trifoliate while pushing the fruit toward genuine quality.
The Yuzuquat is a tri-generic hybrid, a curiosity even among unusual citrus. One parent is the yuzu, itself a cross of Citrus ichangensis and Citrus reticulata; the other is the 'Nagami' kumquat, Fortunella margarita. From that three-way pedigree comes an attractive evergreen citrus that bears sour, juicy, lemon-like fruits about the size of a chicken egg.
NuClem is a special clementine among the cold-hardy citrus, a nucellar selection of the familiar clementine mandarin. Our friend and citrus guru Tom McClendon, who shared this one with us, explains it best: "NuClem is a nucellar Clementine, meaning that it comes true from seed. Most Clementines are polyembryonic, meaning that seeds will almost always produce hybrids with other citrus nearby. NuClem also is distinctive in its cold-hardiness, having proven reliably hardy in Montezuma, GA, making it probably on par with Satsuma. Fruit is globular, about two inches in diameter, with a mildly adherent peel more like an orange than a mandarin. Fruit quality is excellent."
Clytostoma callistegioides is one of those vines that feels as though the plant wandered out of an old botanical expedition: vigorous, evergreen, and brimming with the sort of charm collectors once crossed oceans to find. A close relative of our native crossvine (Bignonia capreolata), this South American cousin shares the same athletic climbing spirit but dresses in glossier, more refined foliage and carries larger flowers.
Cryptomeria japonica is the sugi, the national tree of Japan, the conifer that lines the approach to the shrines at Nikko in avenues planted four centuries ago and still standing. The species makes a very large tree in time, which is exactly the problem for most gardens, and the reason the dwarf and compact selections have been collected so avidly. 'Barabits Gold' is one of the better ones: a small, dense, upright form whose ascending shoots break bright gold at the tips in spring and hold that colour well through the growing season, deepening toward bronze-green as the year turns.
Dendropanax trifidus is one of those quiet, aristocratic evergreens that rewards a second look and then a third. To the casual eye the plant reads as a glossy, tropical-looking small tree, something you would expect to sulk at the first frost; in truth this is a tough, warm-temperate native of the coastal forests of southern Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, hardy well into the Southeast and unbothered by heat, humidity, or a mild winter.
Fokienia hodginsii is the only living species in the genus, a conifer that looks assembled from parts of several others. The flattened, fanning sprays read as arborvitae from across a lawn. Up close, the scale leaves show chalky white bands on their undersides and the small round cones sit closer to Chamaecyparis and Calocedrus. Botanists have argued about where the tree belongs for more than a century and have not finished. Plants of the World Online still accepts the name Fokienia hodginsii, while several recent phylogenetic studies nest the genus inside Chamaecyparis and would have the tree called Chamaecyparis hodginsii. We keep the older name because that is what the plant is known and traded by, and both are defensible depending on whose treatment you follow.
Carolina jessamine is the state flower of South Carolina and one of the most beloved evergreen vines of the South, prized for the wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that opens the gardening year. 'Margarita' is the cold-hardy answer to that beauty, a selection that carries the same sweet-scented gold well north of where the species usually gives out.
