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.
Ruellia caroliniensis, the Carolina wild petunia, is a modest, long-blooming native that carries far more ecological weight than the quiet flowers suggest. From early summer into fall, a steady succession of lavender to violet-purple trumpets, each an inch or two across and lasting only a single day, opens along upright stems a foot or two high, replaced faithfully the next morning so that the plant is seldom out of bloom for months on end.
Salvia urticifolia, the nettleleaf sage, is an uncommon herbaceous perennial native to the Appalachians and the wider Southeast, grown for cool blue-to-violet flowers set off by a pair of white marks in the throat. The bloom comes in the freshness of mid to late spring, the flowers hovering above serrated, nettle-like leaves, and in a generous year a lighter second flush may follow in late summer.
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.
A rain lily that flowers on a whim of the weather. Zephyranthes fosteri, Foster's pink rain lily, is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to Mexico and hardy in the warm South, grown for vivid, crocus-like pink flowers that appear as if overnight after summer and autumn rains.
