Every collection has its unnamed treasures, and this gardenia is one of ours: a plant grown from seed gathered on Emei Shan, the great sacred mountain of Sichuan in southwestern China. The species has not been pinned down, but the plant is unmistakably a gardenia, upright in habit and clothed in long, narrow, glossy dark green leaves quite unlike the broad foliage of the common Cape jasmine.
Gelsemium rankinii is one of the South's gentler mysteries, a twining, semi-evergreen vine that has long threaded through the quiet wetlands and river margins of the Gulf Coast. Where other vines sprawl boldly, the swamp jessamine moves with a kind of restraint, weaving through shrubs and small trees on glossy, fine-textured foliage, with a poise born of deep, humid landscapes.
Glyptostrobus pensilis, the Chinese swamp cypress, is a living fossil and one of the rarest conifers on earth, the last surviving species of an ancient lineage that once ringed the Northern Hemisphere. A deciduous conifer of the cypress family, the swamp cypress is a near-twin of the American baldcypress, sharing the same feathery, soft green foliage, the same love of standing water, and even the same habit of throwing up woody knees from the roots in wet ground. In autumn the foliage turns a warm bronze-red before falling.
Some plants elevate the familiar into the extraordinary, and Gordonia lasianthus 'Variegata' does exactly that, taking the quiet majesty of the native loblolly bay and dressing it in a silken fringe of cream. The glossy green leaves are edged in irregular strokes of ivory, as though touched by the brush of some moonlit painter in the pine woods, and the whole shrub glimmers softly through every season.
Of all the silverbells, this is the one plant hunters remember. Halesia diptera var. magniflora is the large-flowered form of the two-wing silverbell, and the difference is not subtle: the white, bell-shaped flowers run half again larger than the type, sometimes an inch and more across, with the lobes cut so deeply that each bloom flares open like a little white star rather than a closed bell. In full flower, before the leaves are fully out, the branches all but vanish beneath them, and a mature specimen becomes a cloud of white in the April woods.
This is a cold-hardy citrus hybrid bred to carry oranges into gardens too cold for ordinary citrus, a cross between the trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, in the large-flowered form called 'English Large', and the notably hardy Changsha mandarin, Citrus reticulata. Both parents are prized for cold tolerance, and stacking the two produces a small, thorny tree that shrugs off freezes that would kill a true orange. The cross matches the well-known US-852 citrandarin, a hardy-citrus line from the USDA breeding program.
Helianthus verticillatus is a sunflower you grow as much for the story as the flower, though the flower holds up on merit. The plainest field mark is the leaves: narrow, lance-shaped, and arranged in distinct whorls of three or four around the stem rather than in the usual opposite or alternate pairs, a tidy structural signature that names the plant and sets the species apart from every common sunflower. Tall and strong-stemmed, the plant rises six to ten feet and lifts open clusters of clear yellow, dark-centered flowers in late summer and early fall.
Redwing is grown less for the flowers than for what follows them. Through the warm months this fast, twining, semi-woody climber carries loose clusters of small clear-yellow flowers along the stems, pretty enough in passing, but the real event comes after, when each pollinated bloom ripens into a bright red winged fruit, a samara built exactly like the spinning key of a maple. In quantity the red keys smother the vine and glow against the small, neat foliage, an unexpected and long-lasting display that few visitors can name.
Hibiscus hamabo is a tall branching shrub reaching fifteen feet or more, wide and rounded, clothed in broad soft leaves that feel almost felted in the hand. Flowers come through summer in a clear light yellow, single and open-faced, five or six inches across, each one carrying a deep crimson blotch at the throat that pulls the eye straight into the center. Individual flowers last a day, as hibiscus flowers do, and are replaced steadily for weeks. Autumn brings a second act that catches most people by surprise: the leaves turn red before dropping, which is not something the genus is generally known for.
'Tosca' is the offspring of a rare and deliberate cross, a marriage of Hibiscus paramutabilis, the regal, large-flowered species of southeastern China, with Hibiscus syriacus, the familiar Rose of Sharon of countless summer gardens. From that union comes a woody shrub that carries the best of both parents: the scale and drama of the Chinese species and the toughness and reliability of the old dooryard favorite.
Holboellia coriacea is an evergreen twining vine from western China, glossy and leathery in the leaf, each one divided into three long leaflets held on a slender stalk so the whole plant hangs in layers rather than making a solid mat. In spring and early summer come clusters of small flowers, greenish white through to pale purple, and the scent is the surprise: intensely sweet and carrying, far out of proportion to flowers that most people walk straight past. Later, if the season and the siting are right, the vine produces the other trick, fat pinkish-purple pods shaped unmistakably like sausages, ripening into early winter.
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.
Hyalis argentea var. argentea is a plant that spends most of a growing season being mistaken for something else. The leaves are narrow, silver, and whorled along willowy upright stems, so the whole clump reads as an ornamental grass from any distance at all, and the effect is entirely convincing until the flowers open. Then the family shows: this is an aster relative, in the Asteraceae, and the flowers on the taller stems carry only a few ray florets each but are attractive in a spare, high-desert way that suits the foliage exactly. A sub-shrub or perennial to about three feet, clump-forming and modestly stoloniferous.
Few native bulbs command a wet margin the way Hymenocallis liriosme does. From a basal fountain of arching, strap-shaped, glossy green leaves rise leafless scapes, each crowned with several large white flowers whose narrow segments splay outward like pale spider legs around a central membranous cup. The fragrance arrives at dusk, sweet and carrying, a signal to the night-flying moths that pollinate the blooms in late spring and early summer.
Hypericum edisonianum is a Florida endemic with an upright, colony-forming habit, sending up reddish-brown stems clothed in small, leathery, gray-green leaves and topped in the warm months with four-petaled yellow flowers, each brushed with a dense tuft of stamens. As the stems age the bark peels away in thin strips, a subtle textural detail on a shrub that spreads by clonal growth into a low thicket.
Hypericum lissophloeus is the tree among the St. John's Worts, a graceful evergreen that climbs to ten feet or more on slender trunks dressed in smooth, copper-colored bark that peels in thin sheets. The leaves are needle-fine and deep green, so that from a distance the plant reads almost like a small conifer until summer, when small bright yellow flowers scatter along the stems and settle the question of family.
Ilex ambigua is the holly almost nobody offers, a medium to large deciduous shrub or small tree of ten to eighteen feet, running open and airy rather than dense. The leaves are small for a holly, thin, often glossy, and finely toothed, turning a soft yellow before falling. Female plants carry berries that are noticeably large for the size of the plant, bright red and handsome in early autumn, though in our experience here they drop rather sooner than the berries of most hollies, so this is a plant for early fall color rather than for a red Christmas. The habit is loose and the bark smooth gray, and the whole effect is closer to a small serviceberry than to the dense evergreen most people picture when they hear holly.
Ilex amelanchier is one of the surprises of the genus, a holly that drops the leaves in fall and carries none of the usual prickles. This rare native grows as a tall deciduous shrub or small tree, and the female plants, this one among them, hang dull, matte red berries on unusually long stems, a soft-toned, almost muted display quite unlike the glossy scarlet of a Christmas holly.
Ilex cornuta 'D'Or' is the golden-fruited version of a garden classic, a glossy evergreen Chinese holly hung through fall and winter with large, clear yellow berries in place of the usual red. The dark green, leathery leaves are nearly spineless, most carrying just a single spine at the tip, so the effect is polished rather than fierce, the bright fruit standing out cleanly against the deep foliage.
Possumhaw is the deciduous holly of southern bottomlands, a shrub or small tree that spends the growing season looking like nothing in particular and then earns the whole year in December. The leaves drop, and what is left is a fine gray branch structure loaded with fruit that holds on bare wood through the winter. On the ordinary wild plant that fruit is red. Ilex decidua 'Finch's Golden' carries bright yellow fruit instead, a selection made by Bill Finch of Mobile, Alabama, and the difference against a gray winter sky is not subtle.
