Dwarf bluestar is the compact, well-behaved member of the clan, a tidy mound of upright stems and soft green leaves topped in late spring with clusters of powder-blue, star-shaped flowers. Often treated as a low form of the eastern bluestar, Amsonia montana stays small and shapely, a fine choice where the taller bluestars would sprawl.
The white-flowered form of swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata 'Ice Ballet' carries the same upright, well-mannered habit as the species but trades rosy pink for clusters of pure, cool white, held atop sturdy three-to-four-foot stems through summer. The effect is fresh and luminous in a moist border, and just as useful to wildlife.
A boldly striped form of the cast iron plant, Aspidistra elatior 'Variegata' carries the same broad, leathery, evergreen blades, each brushed lengthwise with bands of creamy white over deep glossy green. The variegation lights up a shaded corner, and the toughness is all there too: this is a near-indestructible evergreen for difficult, low-light places.
Smooth aster is one of the cleanest and most dependable of the fall natives, and 'Bluebird' is among the best forms. Aster laevis 'Bluebird' builds an upright, vase-shaped clump of smooth, blue-green foliage, then opens, in late summer and fall, sprays of violet-blue daisies centered in gold, a generous late feast for bees and butterflies as the season winds down.
Callicarpa dichotoma 'Issai', the purple beautyberry, is a compact, cold-hardy selection grown for a heavy crop of glossy, violet-purple berries that ring the stems from late summer well into fall. Smaller and tidier than the American beautyberry, 'Issai' fruits young and freely, often setting berries on a single plant, and holds the color long after the leaves have gone.
Calycanthus 'Venus' is a white-flowered sweetshrub bred by Dr. Tom Ranney at North Carolina State University, drawing on three species at once: the Eastern Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus), the California sweetshrub (Calycanthus occidentalis), and the Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis, long known as Sinocalycanthus). The result is a deciduous shrub that carries the best of all three: hardiness, substance, and an unusual flower.
Born of careful hands and watchful eyes at the JC Raulston Arboretum in North Carolina, Calycanthus × raulstonii 'Hartlage Wine' is a sweetshrub of uncommon grace. Richard Hartlage made the cross as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in 1991, pairing the Southern native Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus) with the refined Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis); the seedling first flowered in 1996, and the hybrid name honors J.C. Raulston, the arboretum's late director.
Two camellias do most of the work in American gardens, Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua, in countless named forms. The Far East holds far more, and Woodlanders is among the few nurseries offering the lesser-known species to gardeners here. Camellia crapnelliana, the Crapnell camellia, is one of the most distinctive: a slow, upright evergreen first described from Hong Kong Island and named for the collector Crapnell.
Camellia gigantocarpa is a rare and remarkable species from the subtropical forests of southern China, first documented in the wild in the 1980s in Guangxi Province. The name says the essential thing: gigantocarpa, giant fruit. Where most camellias are grown for flowers, this species is prized above all for the great woody seed capsules that follow them, among the largest in the entire genus.
The name means peacock camellia, and the vanity here is all in the foliage. Long, narrow leaves with peculiar fishtailed tips drape from the branches in a pronounced weeping habit, more willow than camellia, more Japanese woodblock print than Southern border. This is not the camellia a grandmother grew.
The rockroses bloom as if for a single day, and in a sense they do. Each papery flower of Cistus x purpureus lasts only from morning to evening before dropping, yet through late spring the shrub opens fresh bloom after fresh bloom, so the whole plant seems perpetually covered. The flowers are the draw: two to three inches wide, crushed-silk petals of pinky purple, each stamped at the base with a deep maroon blotch, a marking that earned the old garden name orchidspot rockrose. Rockroses are not roses, and are not related; the resemblance is only in the open, five-petalled face.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the Morton citrange is a handsome one. Like other sweet orange and trifoliate orange crosses, Morton makes an attractive ornamental evergreen, with fragrant white spring flowers and orange fruit, but the fruit here sets the cultivar apart: large, smooth-skinned, and remarkably like a true orange, with very few seeds.
Summersweet, Clethra alnifolia, is one of the great fragrant natives of the eastern United States, a shrub of moist woods and pond edges whose white summer spikes carry a honey-and-clove perfume across the whole garden. Colonists called the plant Sweet Pepperbush, for the peppercorn-like seed heads that follow, and Summersweet, for the scent; the flowers even lather softly in water and once served as a field soap.
Clinopodium coccineum is a small, aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family, native to the deep, well-drained sands of the southeastern coastal plain, from Mississippi and Georgia down into Florida. The loose, open frame and small, spicy-scented leaves would earn a quiet place on their own, but the flowers are the event: showy scarlet tubes carried over a long summer season, held out like little trumpets that hummingbirds cannot resist.
The American smoketree, Cotinus obovatus, is an uncommon small to medium native tree, kin to the familiar European smoketree but bolder in leaf and rarer in gardens. The common name comes from the fruiting stage, when the loose, fuzzy flower panicles blur the whole crown into a soft haze of smoke. The broad, oval, blue-green leaves are noticeably larger than those of the European Cotinus coggygria, and they close the year in a spectacular blaze of orange, yellow, and red-purple, some of the finest fall color of any native tree.
The genus name Dietes comes from the Greek for "having two relatives," a botanist's nod to the plant's kinship with both Iris and Moraea, near neighbors in the iris family. The species epithet bicolor means simply two-colored, for the soft yellow petals brushed with a dark thumbprint at the base. Between the two words, the whole plant is named for doubleness: two kin, two colors.
Fontanesia is one of those quiet shrubs that rewards a close look and a little curiosity. A deciduous member of the olive family, Oleaceae, and a near relative of the privets, the plant carries narrow, lanceolate, opposite leaves several inches long on a fine, twiggy frame, and shares the easy, adaptable constitution that makes the privets so obliging in difficult ground.
Grevillea 'Canberra Gem' is a bold and unusual Australian evergreen, a hybrid of Grevillea juniperina and Grevillea rosmarinifolia that brings fine texture, vivid color, and a touch of the exotic to an adventurous garden. The narrow, needle-like foliage is often mistaken for a conifer, until late winter, when the shrub reveals a true identity in a profusion of rose-red, spider-like flowers that spill from the branches and catch the eye clear across the garden.
Grevillea rosmarinifolia is a fine-textured Australian evergreen, a rounded to semi-prostrate shrub whose narrow, deep green leaves look uncannily like rosemary, giving the plant both the species name and a handsome, needled presence the year round. The likeness is only skin-deep, for this is a member of the protea family, Proteaceae, worlds away from any herb.
Hosta yingeri is one of the more recent hostas to reach gardens and one of the most distinct, a species found only on a scatter of rocky islands in the Huksan Archipelago off the southwestern coast of Korea. The American plantsman Barry Yinger collected the plant on Taehuksan Island in 1985, and the botanist Samuel B. Jones formally named the species in 1989 in Yinger's honor. For a genus most gardeners associate with the woodlands of Japan, this Korean islander broadened the family map.
