Sarcococca orientalis is a fragrant, uncommon sweet box from China, a compact evergreen of the boxwood family grown, like its kin, for a winter perfume far larger than the flowers that carry it. In late winter small white flowers open along the stems, modest to the eye but richly and sweetly scented, filling a still, mild day with fragrance and giving the shade garden a lift when little else stirs.
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.
×Schimlinia floribunda is one of the rarest woody plants a gardener can grow: a deliberate intergeneric hybrid between two members of the tea family, Theaceae, uniting the fabled Franklinia alatamaha with the Asian evergreen Schima argentea. The cross marries the ornamental drama and hardiness of Franklinia with the vigor, adaptability, and evergreen constitution of Schima, and the result carries large, camellia-like white flowers, glossy foliage, and an upright, well-furnished frame. The hybrid formula name honors both parents at once, Schima and Franklinia folded into a single word.
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.
Sinojackia xylocarpa is a rare flowering treasure from the hills of eastern China, a deciduous small tree or large shrub that few gardeners have ever met. Known as the jacktree, the species belongs to the storax family, Styracaceae, a close cousin of the snowbells and silverbells, and carries the same poetry of spring: pendant, bell-shaped white flowers that dangle beneath arching branches like small antique lanterns swaying in a breeze.
This curious little Smilax is one of the quieter treasures in the Woodlanders catalog, a deciduous groundcover built of fine, twiggy, interlacing stems and small leaves, so densely and geometrically branched that the plant earned the house name Chicken Wire Plant. A member of the greenbrier family, Smilacaceae, this dwarf relative of the climbing greenbriers trades the usual vining habit for a low, intricate, shrubby tangle.
Stewartia malacodendron is a much sought native deciduous shrub, and one of only two stewartias native to the United States. The species sits in Theaceae, the tea family, so the kinship with Camellia is real and visible the moment the flowers open: white, three inches across, built like a single rose, with a boss of purple-filamented stamens around blue anthers at the center. Nothing else in an American woodland looks remotely like it. The plant is found mostly on streamside slopes in rich woods and is widely scattered in spots from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, never in stands, usually as three to ten plants in a place. Bloom comes in early summer, a flower or two at a time over several weeks, and the autumn foliage turns orange to red.
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.
In the open oak-hickory woodlands and fire-maintained savannas that once covered the upland South, Georgia aster was a fixture, a late-season native sending up violet-blue flowers in October and November at the precise moment when almost everything else had finished. That landscape is largely gone now, and the aster went with most of it.
Imagine a shrub that looks like a conifer caught in an airy, pink-flowering daydream. Tamarix ramosissima, often called tamarisk or saltcedar, is a deciduous shrub or small tree with fine, scale-like leaves that read as cedar from ten feet away, yet drop in winter. That contradiction is the charm: conifer-like texture on a plant that is no conifer at all.
Florida yew is one of the rarest conifers in North America, a shrubby evergreen restricted to a single stretch of steep, cool ravines along the eastern bluffs of the Apalachicola River in the Florida Panhandle, and nowhere else on Earth. A shrub or small tree of the shaded understory, the plant carries flat, soft, dark-green needles and, on female plants, the fleshy scarlet arils that mark every yew.
A dwarf form of one of Japan's legendary Five Sacred Trees of Kiso, the goboku no kinbatsu, a select group of conifers protected by feudal law for centuries, reserved for imperial residences and temple construction, where commoners caught poaching the wood faced execution. The species, Thujopsis dolabrata, is endemic to Japan and known there as asunaro, a name that translates beautifully and a little wistfully as tomorrow it will become hinoki, a nod to the tree's resemblance to the more revered hinoki cypress, forever almost but not quite the more famous tree. Thujopsis is the sole species in the entire genus.
Botanists now file this hemlock under Tsuga dumosa, the Himalayan hemlock, though the tree reached American gardens, and reached us, as Tsuga yunnanensis. The two names describe one tree seen from opposite ends of a very long range: dumosa, meaning bushy, from the Nepalese and Bhutanese end, and yunnanensis from the Chinese. Kew's Plants of the World Online treats the Yunnan name as a synonym, so the accepted name comes first here and the old one stays in parentheses, because that is the name most people will be searching for.
A large evergreen shrub with glossy leaves, reaching six to twelve feet in time and occasionally more, with the leathery, polished foliage that sets the evergreen blueberries apart from their deciduous relatives. New growth flushes bronze to red before hardening to dark green. White urn-shaped flowers hang in short racemes in early summer, each cluster subtended by the leafy bracts that give the species its name, and are followed by small dark berries, edible and mildly sweet. The habit is dense and rounded, useful year-round in a way that a highbush blueberry never manages. Our plants were struck from cuttings taken at the old Woodlanders site, off stock that has been growing here in Aiken for many years.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
5–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, digestive health, topical applications
Creeping blueberry runs flat. Vaccinium crassifolium ‘Bloodstone’ makes a dense evergreen mat five to eight inches deep, the trailing stems rooting and swelling into small woody burls wherever they touch ground, so a single plant knits outward year on year into a carpet. The leaves are thick and leathery and hold a semi-gloss, broader and rounder than the species runs, closer in texture to periwinkle than to anything most people picture when they hear the word blueberry. In winter the late-maturing foliage takes on a reddish cast and the stems darken to a distinct red, which is where the name comes from. This is a winter plant, not a spring one, and the color is the whole argument.
Vaccinium sempervirens is one of the rarest plants in this catalog, an evergreen blueberry known in the wild from a single sandy corner of Lexington County, in the Sandhills of South Carolina. A true local endemic, the plant grows along Atlantic white cedar bogs and seepage slopes where the water table sits high and the sand stays acid, and to grow one is to hold a small piece of a landscape almost nobody has seen.
A rare white form of the well-behaved native. Wisteria frutescens 'Nivea' is a twining, woody, deciduous vine with compound leaves and short clusters of pure white flowers that open with the foliage, far less rampant than the common Asian wisterias and, in white, a genuine rarity. This form was virtually unknown to American gardeners until Woodlanders brought the plant into the trade. It has long been listed, here and elsewhere, as Wisteria frutescens var. nivea; the botanical variety has no standing in the current literature, so we now carry it under the cultivar name it has earned.
Few garden plants have a discovery story this recent. In the autumn of 1999, Vietnamese foresters surveying timber on the karst limestone mountains of Ha Giang province, close to the Chinese border, came upon a conifer nobody could name. Specimens collected in 2001 reached Aljos Farjon at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and in 2002 Farjon and his Vietnamese, American and Russian colleagues, among them Nguyen Tien Hiep, Phan Ke Loc, Daniel Harder and Leonid Averyanov, published the tree as a new genus and species, Xanthocyparis vietnamensis. The discovery of a whole new conifer genus made headlines around the world.
