Madeira vine is a fast, twining, deciduous climber with fleshy, heart-shaped leaves and sprays of tiny, fragrant cream-white flowers in late summer and fall. Anredera cordifolia climbs by winding tuberous stems, and a warty crop of aerial tubers along the stems, some as large as a small potato, is the surest mark of the plant and a ready means of increase.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–20 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
topical applications, reproductive health, general wellness
A rare, semi-evergreen shrub, Baccharis dioica resembles the common groundsel bush, Baccharis halimifolia, but is quite distinct. In 1979, just before Hurricane Frederic did tremendous damage to the Mobile, Alabama area, we found this plant growing behind the dunes on Dauphin Island.
A small boxwood with narrow, bright green leaves and an unusually showy spring bloom, this is apparently the true Buxus harlandii. The boxwoods commonly sold in the South as B. harlandii, including the variety 'Richard', are, according to Dr. Todd Lasseigne, another Asian species, Buxus bodinieri; the real harlandii is much less often seen.
Callicarpa acuminata, the black beautyberry, is the Mexican cousin of the familiar American beautyberry, a deciduous shrub of arching branches that, in fall, lines the stems with clusters of small, shiny berries in glossy black rather than the usual purple. The dark fruit is a quiet, sophisticated turn on the beautyberry idea, set off by the green leaves and lingering into the cool months.
Camellia saluensis 'Appleblossom' is a pink-flowered selection of the Salween camellia, chosen for the abundance of soft, single, apple-blossom-pink flowers borne in late winter and spring. What sets this plant apart is not a registration certificate but a story: the stock came originally from the Norfolk, Virginia garden of the late Frederic Heutte, the French-born plantsman who served as the first director of Norfolk Botanical Garden.
A silvery, soft-textured juvenile-foliage form with an unusual and well-documented history. 'Shiva' was originally presumed to be Chamaecyparis thyoides, the Atlantic white cedar, but now appears to be a form of Chamaecyparis pisifera, the sawara cypress of Japan. The plant was found as a seedling on Cape Cod by Rekha Morris of Pendleton, South Carolina, and introduced by Clarence Towe of Walhalla, South Carolina. By all signs this curious form will never become a large tree.
Sourced originally from the noted citrus enthusiast Tom McClendon, Citrumelo 'Dallas' is a cold-hardy hybrid between the rugged trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, and a grapefruit. From that unlikely pairing comes a vigorous small tree that carries the trifoliate's toughness and a good measure of grapefruit character in the fruit.
Citrumelo 'Dunstan' is a hardy heirloom hybrid of the rugged trifoliate orange, Citrus trifoliata, and the sunlit grapefruit, Citrus paradisi, and from that unlikely marriage comes a fruit and tree of real merit. The golden-yellow globes swell to nearly four inches across, fragrant, and, touched with sugar, carry the tart refreshment of a grapefruit picked a little shy of ripe. Here is fruit both rustic and refined, bred for survival yet still hinting at the orchard.
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.
A very old Chinese cultivar, almost certainly named for the capital of Hunan province where the fruit has been grown for centuries, and quite possibly carrying C. ichangensis somewhere in the parentage. That suspected ancestry would account for the cold tolerance that has made Changsha the parent stock for nearly every modern hardy citrus breeding program of consequence: Wayne Hanna's seedless work at UGA Tifton, the Arctic Frost satsuma cross out of Texas, and others still in trial.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and Citrus taiwanica is one of the tougher evergreens of the group. A vigorous, upright, spreading, thorny tree, the Taiwan orange bears sour tangerine-to-orange fruit that is both ornamental and useful, the base of a very tasty ade. One of the hardier evergreen citrus, the tree sets good crops here in Aiken, South Carolina.
Every grafted citrus tree is two plants pretending to be one: a familiar fruiting top, and a rootstock below the graft union doing the unglamorous work of roots, vigor, and disease resistance. US-1516 is one of the latter, and a good story all the same. The cross was made by the USDA in 1975, a pairing of opposites: African pummelo, the giant of the genus, crossed with Flying Dragon, the contorted, fiercely thorned, cold-hardy form of trifoliate orange (Poncirus trifoliata) that lends so many hardy citrus their backbone. The seedlings went into the ground at the Whitmore farm in Groveland, Florida in 1976 and then, in the patient way of tree breeding, were watched for forty years. Kim Bowman's program at the USDA lab in Fort Pierce released them at last in 2015, into the worst of the huanglongbing epidemic, the bacterial greening disease that has hollowed out Florida's groves. On infected ground they keep their grafted tops healthier and more productive than the old standbys. We offer them ungrafted, which is an unusual thing to sell and an honest one: this is a tree for the cold-hardy citrus tinkerer, the person who wants to practice budding, raise their own understock, or simply grow the trifoliate-blooded foundation and see how far north the plant will go. They come nearly true from seed, vigorous and uniform, and they ask only that you have plans for them. Graft them bold, or just let them teach you the lower half of the tree.
A small, slow Japanese cedar that flushes the color of cold lemonade in spring, pale, almost translucent yellow, then settles into soft chartreuse through summer. The foliage stays juvenile throughout, fine and feathery rather than the awl-shaped scale of a mature Cryptomeria, which gives 'Lemonade' a softer presence than most gardeners expect of a conifer. This is texture you can run a hand through.
Duranta serratifolia, the tala blanco of northern Argentina, is a South American cousin of the familiar golden dewdrop and belongs, like all Duranta, to the verbena family. The species epithet serratifolia means saw-toothed leaf, for the finely serrated margins that separate this plant from the smoother-leaved dewdrops. In the wild the shrub grows through the dry forests and thorn scrub of the Argentine northwest, where the common name, roughly white tala, sets the plant among the talas, the spiny native trees and shrubs that give those woodlands their character.
Every nursery keeps a few mysteries, and this trailing evergreen euonymus is one of ours: a plant still awaiting a firm name, possibly Euonymus aculeatus, collected by Frank Bell high on Mount Emei (Emeishan) in Sichuan, China. Low and spreading, the stems carry long-pointed, finely toothed leaves about two inches long, glossy and evergreen, on a habit that hugs the ground and wanders steadily outward.
This very rare aster, now placed in the genus Eurybia, is a true Florida endemic, native only to the moist pine flatwoods of the lower Apalachicola River. The plant is a botanical oddity: the clumping, foot-tall foliage is narrow, stiff, and grass-like, so unlike the leafy stems of an ordinary aster that a passerby might take the clump for a tuft of sedge. From late spring into early summer, slender flower stems rise above the leaves carrying clusters of inch-wide lavender-purple daisies, each ringing a small yellow eye.
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.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, their name taken from the Greek word for willow, after leaves that recall a willow's. Itea chinensis is the Chinese sweetspire, an uncommon evergreen member of the group, a medium to tall shrub of neat, compact form with oval, glossy leaves that hold through the year in the warm South. In spring the plant hangs slender four-inch spikes of small white flowers, softly fragrant and busy with bees.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, named from the Greek word for willow after their willow-like leaves. Itea oldhamii is a little-known evergreen sweetspire from Taiwan, a compact shrub with an unusual party trick: the juvenile leaves can be holly-like, edged with small teeth, while the mature leaves settle to a smooth, entire margin. In late spring the plant carries racemes of small white flowers over glossy evergreen foliage.
