This low-growing form of Podocarpus macrophyllus is a compact, spreading evergreen with flat, needle-like leaves that spiral tightly around the stems. Where the ordinary yew pine climbs into an upright shrub or small tree, this selection stays low and horizontal, building a dense, glossy green mat of steady year-round texture and structure.
Polyspora axillaris, the fried egg tree, is a glossy, small evergreen tree or large shrub of the tea family, Theaceae, native to southern China, Taiwan, and Vietnam and still rarely cultivated in the United States. A close relative of the native loblolly bay (Gordonia lasianthus), the plant bears abundant, showy white flowers three inches across.
The procimequat is a rare and fascinating citrus hybrid, born from a botanical marriage of the Eustis limequat (itself a cross of kumquat and lime) and the Hong Kong kumquat (Fortunella hindsii). The result is a precocious, compact plant that combines the zesty lime tang of the limequat parent with the tiny, ornamental charm of the wild kumquats, all on a frame small enough for a patio pot.
Pseudolarix kaempferi, better known by the synonym Pseudolarix amabilis and the common name golden larch, is a rare, slow-growing deciduous conifer native to eastern China. Despite the name, the golden larch is not a true larch but the sole member of its own genus, Pseudolarix, prized for a graceful broad-pyramidal form, soft texture, and a brilliant golden fall color that rivals any maple or ginkgo.
The little epaulette tree is a rare small deciduous tree or large shrub from eastern Asia, and the common name is the best description anyone has managed. In late spring and early summer the branch tips hang with drooping panicles of small fragrant white flowers, and the effect really is of fringed military shoulder boards swinging from the ends of the branches. The leaves are ovate and bristle-toothed, the habit open and spreading, and the whole tree has an unforced elegance that the heavier flowering trees never quite reach.
The berries are the whole argument. Where most firethorns load their branches with orange and scarlet, this clone ripens to a clean clear yellow, abundant and unusually persistent, holding well after the red-fruited kinds have been picked over by birds. The foliage is relatively small, glossy, and evergreen, which gives the shrub a tidier and far less coarse look than the genus normally manages. Flat clusters of small white flowers cover the branches in late spring and are worked hard by bees. The thorns are entirely real and should be respected.
Pyracomeles vilmorinii is the sort of plant collectors trade knowing looks over, a small, fine-textured evergreen so uncommon that most gardeners have never met one. The little leaves are cut into narrow, fern-like divisions along arching, thornless branches, and in spring flat clusters of small white flowers give way by autumn to a scatter of coral-red fruits. The overall effect is airy and delicate, unusual in an evergreen shrub.
Pyrrosia lingua 'Kei Kan' is a fern for people who think they do not like ferns. Nothing here is lacy or feathery. The fronds are thick, leathery, and strap-shaped, and in this selection the tips fork and crest into ragged, comb-like divisions, the feature that earns the Japanese name Kei Kan, meaning cockscomb. The overall effect is closer to a piece of green leather sculpture than to the soft filigree most people picture when they hear the word fern.
Quercus acerifolia is one of the rarest oaks in North America, and one of the most quietly beautiful. The name says the first thing you notice: acerifolia means maple-leaved, and the upper leaves really do look like a sugar maple's, often as wide as they are long, cut into three to five sharp, glossy lobes that turn deep red and burgundy in fall. A close relative of the Shumard oak, maple-leaf oak grows as anything from a stunted, multi-trunked shrub on a windswept ridge to a single-trunked tree of forty or fifty feet in cultivation.
Quercus arizonica is the heavy, pale-barked white oak of the Madrean Sky Islands, the ranges that lift out of the desert in southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, west Texas, and northern Mexico. Growth is slow and the frame is broad: stout limbs, an irregularly spreading crown, and in time a trunk three feet through on a tree capable of sixty feet where the site allows, though garden specimens usually settle nearer thirty. The leaves give the species away, thick and stiff as harness leather, blue-green above and conspicuously pale and felted beneath, holding through most winters and dropping only as new growth pushes in spring. Old bark goes ashy white and deeply furrowed, which is where the common name comes from.
Georgia oak is a rarity in every sense, a small, refined red oak so restricted in the wild that most people have never seen one. The species clings to the granite outcrops of west-central Georgia and central Alabama, the flatrock country around Stone Mountain, where thin soil keeps the plant stunted and shrubby; give the same tree good ground and it grows into a shapely small tree of fifteen to thirty feet, clothed in small, glossy, bristle-tipped leaves that turn red and burgundy in fall.
Schlechtendal and Chamisso published this oak in 1830 from material gathered around Jalapa, in Veracruz, and the epithet they settled on, germana, is the Latin word for genuine, true, of the same stock. Neither botanist left a note explaining the choice. The common names have been more generous since: royal oak, encino roble, and best of all avocado-leaf oak, for foliage so long, leathery, and lustrous that the leaves could pass for those of a Persea. In the cloud forests where both trees grow, the resemblance is more than a coincidence of shape; the two share the same wet, mild, dripping world.
Few oaks in North America are rarer. Quercus oglethorpensis went unnoticed by science until 1940, when the botanist Wilbur Duncan described the tree from material gathered in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, and gave the species the county's name. Even now Oglethorpe oak is known from only a scattering of stands across the Georgia and South Carolina Piedmont, with far-flung outliers in Louisiana and Mississippi, and the species sits on every serious list of oaks of conservation concern.
A small-to-medium evergreen oak unlike anything in the North American flora. Quercus salicina belongs to section Cyclobalanopsis of the oak genus, the ring-cupped oaks, an entirely Asian group of evergreen oaks distinguished from every American oak by the concentric rings on the acorn cup, rather than the overlapping scales of the red and white oak groups. Some taxonomists treat Cyclobalanopsis as a genus of its own. To grow this oak in a Southeastern garden is to bring in a fundamentally different evolutionary lineage, one that has been evolving in isolation in the temperate forests of Japan and Korea for tens of millions of years, in parallel with the separate American radiation. The result reads as recognizably Quercus in habit and presence, yet is architecturally distinct in nearly every detail.
The Southern live oak needs no introduction in the coastal South, where the great, spreading, moss-draped evergreens are as much a part of the landscape as the light. Quercus virginiana 'Bok Tower' begins from that familiar species but carries an unusual story and, perhaps, an unusual future.
'Great Balls of Fire' belongs to the celebrated line of Aromi azaleas, the life's work of Dr. Eugene Aromi, a University of South Alabama education professor who set out in the late 1960s simply to help the azaleas in his Mobile front yard survive the Gulf Coast's brutal heat and humidity. What began as a backyard experiment grew into one of the great American breeding programs. From 1971 onward Aromi crossed cold-hardy Exbury and Knap Hill azaleas with tough southern native species, chief among them the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chasing large, fragrant, heat-proof deciduous flowers. He made more than a thousand crosses and raised over fifty thousand seedlings before his death in 2004, and roughly a hundred of the best were named. This is counted among them.
Rhododendron austrinum 'Don's Variegated' is a rare variegated form of the native Florida azalea, carrying the wild flame azalea of the Gulf states but brushed with a fine tracing of gold along each leaf edge. The selection was discovered by Don Jacobs, the noted Georgia plantsman behind Eco-Gardens in Decatur, who found among seedlings of R. austrinum a plant whose foliage held light even before the flowers arrived. Variegation is uncommon in the native azaleas, which makes this a genuine collector's plant.
'Millie Mac' is a wild-selected native azalea from the damp hollows of Escambia County, Alabama, where Floyd McConnell found this plant as a distinctive limb sport on a wild shrub and propagated it for a beauty all its own. Related to the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, the selection shows white-margined flowers that hint at a touch of R. canescens in the background, and the lineage remains a matter of pleasant debate among native-azalea growers.
This is a rare and radiant selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen for flowers of pure, clear yellow. Where the species usually runs to golden-orange, this form holds a clean, buttery, luminous yellow, a color that lights up the spring woodland like sunshine slipping through the canopy. For gardeners and collectors who love the native azaleas, a truly pure-yellow austrinum is an uncommon prize.
Chapman's rhododendron is a compact evergreen shrub of six to eight feet, carrying small, thick, distinctly rounded leaves in a light green, with margins that roll under slightly at the edge. In late spring the plant opens clusters of rose-pink flowers, funnel-shaped and freely borne, and the effect on a well-grown specimen is generous rather than sparse. Set beside the closely related Rhododendron minus, this plant reads lighter and rounder in the leaf, and most authorities now treat the two as one species, filing this one as Rhododendron minus var. chapmanii. We keep the name under which gardeners and native-plant people know the plant.
