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."
Clematis morefieldii, Morefield's leather flower, is one of the rarest of the native clematis, a delicate climbing vine known in the wild from only a small pocket of limestone country around Huntsville, Alabama, and just into Tennessee. Like the other leather flowers, this species trades broad, flat blooms for small, nodding, urn-shaped flowers, here a soft, downy pink, their sepal tips curling back at the rim. The stems and leaves carry a fine coat of whitish hairs, giving the whole plant a soft, silvered look.
Most of the summersweets drop their leaves and sleep through winter; Clethra pringlei keeps them. This Mexican member of the clan is a broad-leaved evergreen, a large, slow-growing shrub or small tree from the mountain woodlands of northeastern Mexico, and one of the more surprising plants in the genus for a gardener who knows only the deciduous American kinds.
Cleyera japonica was for generations placed in the tea family, the Theaceae, alongside camellia and tea themselves, and the resemblance still reads in the glossy, leathery, deep green leaves. Later molecular study moved the genus out of that family and into the Pentaphylacaceae, so the old tea-family listing has since been dropped, though the kinship of appearance remains. In the plant's native Japan the species carries a sacred weight few garden shrubs can claim: this is the sakaki, written with a character that fuses the signs for tree and for god, and the branches are cut for tamagushi, the leafy wands offered at Shinto shrines for blessing and purification. Small, sweetly scented cream flowers open in early summer, followed by berries that ripen from red to black.
Cliftonia monophylla 'Berry Pink' is a rare, pink-flowered selection of the Black Titi, a native evergreen shrub or small tree of the southeastern coastal plain that normally blooms in white. The species haunts the acid bogs, pond margins, and titi swamps from the Carolinas to the Gulf, where the early flowers make the buckwheat tree one of the first and most important nectar sources of the southern year, the source of the prized titi honey.
Large-flowered scarlet calamint is a small, wiry, semi-evergreen subshrub of the Florida sandhills, close kin to the better-known red basil, Clinopodium coccineum, and distinguished chiefly by the size of the flowers. Slender scarlet tubes, generously long, open along the stems from spring through summer and are built precisely for hummingbirds, which find them quickly and come back. The leaves are small, neat and aromatic, throwing a clean mint scent when brushed, and the whole plant stays open and airy rather than dense, better placed at the front of a bed than in the middle of it.
A small shrub of the Cumberland Plateau, found only on the flood-scoured cobble and sand bars of three river systems in eastern Tennessee and a sliver of Kentucky: the Big South Fork of the Cumberland, the Caney Fork, and the Obed. The rest of the Conradina clan keeps to the sand scrub of Florida and the Gulf Coast of Alabama, sun-baked and semitropical. This species took a different path, north into the cooler uplands, and is the only member of the genus that never reached Florida at all. The cold-hardiness that came with the move is the gift to gardens farther north.
Coreopsis integrifolia, the Chipola River coreopsis, is a rare southeastern native that saves its show for the end of the season. When most of the summer flowers have gone over, this tickseed lifts deep golden-yellow daisies, each centered with a dark maroon eye, on slender stems well above the foliage, bringing fresh color to the fall garden. A choice and uncommon perennial, known in the wild from only a handful of counties, the plant is as valuable to the gardener as it is to the pollinators working late.
There is a version of the flowering dogwood almost nobody has met. Cornus florida 'Suwanee Squat' was found in Suwannee County, Florida, by Bob Simons, a forest ecologist who spent half a century protecting the wild hardwood country of north Florida. As a young man in the early 1970s he walked a mixed-hardwood hammock outside Gainesville, decided the place was worth saving, and talked ten landowners and the state into making it San Felasco Hammock; that became the pattern of his life. A man who knew that kind of forest the way most of us know our own street is exactly the sort to notice a dogwood doing something a dogwood is not supposed to do. Woodlanders introduced his low, sprawling oddity to cultivation, and the plant has stayed scarce ever since, the kind of tree you mostly hear about secondhand from someone who saw one and never got over it.
Crataegus harbisonii is a small, thorny, deciduous hawthorn with unusually large leaves for the genus, white spring flowers, and red fall fruit. Behind that modest description stands one of the rarest trees in North America: Harbison's hawthorn was perhaps once fairly common around central Tennessee, but is now all but extinct in the wild.
Few native shrubs carry as much quiet history as Croton alabamensis, the Alabama croton, a rarity known in the wild from only a handful of counties along the Cahaba and Black Warrior rivers, where the shrub clings to dry, limestone bluffs. This is a plant of the Southern woodland edge, once more widespread and now treasured wherever a gardener can offer the Alabama croton a home.
This spiny, sprawling, half-vining shrub carries glossy evergreen leaves and a tangle of thorns. Sometimes classified as a Maclura and related to the native Osage orange, cockspur thorn ranges widely across eastern Asia and south to Australia, yet stays rare and little known in North America, familiar mostly to a few bonsai enthusiasts.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
15–30 ft.
Bloom
Green
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support, pain relief, reproductive health
This is the silvery blue-needled form of the China fir, and the color is the reason to choose it over the ordinary green. Needles are broad, flat, stiff, and sharply pointed, an inch or two long, arranged in spirals that read as flat sprays and holding a distinct glaucous blue that intensifies in good light. The frame is boldly pyramidal with tiered horizontal branching, reaching forty to sixty feet in cultivation here, considerably more in China. Old bark peels in long strips to reveal reddish brown beneath. Dead needles hang on inside the crown for a year or two, which some gardeners dislike and others regard as part of the character; either way, a China fir is never mistaken for anything else.
Once thought lost to time and development, Cyrilla arida, known as Scrub Titi, is a botanical rarity with a story as striking as the summer bloom. The famed botanist J.K. Small first described this shrub in the early twentieth century from the desert-like scrub of central Florida. For decades the identity of Scrub Titi was debated and any wild presence uncertain, until a dedicated search led to rediscovery by Kenneth Wurdack and the Woodlanders team in Highlands County, Florida. That tiny remnant population may now be gone, and Cyrilla arida may no longer exist in the wild, which makes every plant in cultivation all the more precious.
Cyrilla parvifolia 'Small Leaf' is a rare, fine-textured native selection that we collected in Franklin County, Florida, prized for the distinctly small, evergreen leaves and the delicate, branching habit. Though sometimes grouped botanically with Cyrilla racemiflora, the more widespread Coastal Titi, this selection stands apart in both form and foliage, an easy standout in native and ornamental plantings alike.
Few plants carry their history as plainly as Danae racemosa. The name reaches back to Greek myth, to Danae, daughter of the king of Argos, and the foliage carries a heavier classical freight than almost anything else you can grow in shade: Roman poet laureates are said to have worn the sprays as their wreath, and Alexander the Great may have taken his victory crowns from the same hills where he was fighting. Hence the two common names that have followed the plant for centuries, poet's laurel and Alexandrian laurel. Danae is, for the record, no true laurel at all.
Daphniphyllum calycinum is a bold evergreen shrub that looks, at a glance, like a rhododendron, though the two are unrelated. Handsome, leathery, oval leaves cluster toward the branch tips, deep green above and glaucous, almost bluish-white beneath, giving the plant an exotic, architectural presence in the shade garden. Grown almost entirely for that striking foliage, this is a shrub for the collector rather than the crowd, and one virtually unknown in North American gardens.
