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.
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.
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.
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 virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands, familiar in gardens for fragrant white flower spikes and fiery fall color. 'Shirley's Compact,' sometimes called Shirley's Midget, takes the species to an extreme: a true miniature, a dense little bun of a plant with tiny, twisted, inch-long leaves, growing so slowly that a ten-year-old clump may stand only a foot or a foot and a half tall while spreading two or three feet wide.
Jasminum x stephanense, the Stephan jasmine, is the rare pink-flowered hybrid of the group, a cross between the red jasmine, Jasminum beesianum, and the poet's jasmine, Jasminum officinale. The vigorous, semi-evergreen scrambling vine carries small, soft pink, fragrant flowers over slender stems clothed in fine pinnate leaves, combining the pink of one parent with the hardiness and perfume of the other.
This quietly handsome evergreen has grown well for years in the Woodlanders garden here in Aiken, South Carolina, holding a place in semi-shade where many broadleaf evergreens sulk. The spicebush earns a spot on foliage alone: glossy, leathery leaves, roughly heart-shaped and about three inches across, each marked by three bold veins, with new growth flushing a soft bronze before deepening to green.
Hardiness
Zones 8–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
6–10 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, pain relief, reproductive health
Myrica rubra, the Chinese bayberry or yangmei, is a fruiting evergreen tree from the misty mountains of East Asia, revered for centuries across China and Japan for tangy-sweet berries and an elegant, shapely form. Imagine cherries and cranberries with a botanical lovechild that had the moodiness of a plum and the antioxidant punch of a superfruit, and something close to yangmei would be the result. The plants we grow are female, tissue-cultured clones of a named selection.
Passiflora 'Incense' was not bred in anyone's backyard. The cross was made at the USDA's Subtropical Horticulture Research Station in Miami, Florida, where a seedling of the native maypop, Passiflora incarnata, crossed with the South American Passiflora cincinnata (itself a USDA introduction from Argentina) was selected and entered into the national Plant Inventory in 1974 as PI 384497. Government work, in other words, and some of the better work the department ever did. The hybrid gathers the toughness of the native parent and the drama of the exotic one into a single deep-violet flower four to five inches across, the wavy corona filaments frilled and banded in purple and white, carrying a sweet, incense-like fragrance that gives the plant its name.
Physostegia correllii, Correll's obedient plant, is a rare and handsome member of the mint family, a robust, upright, somewhat succulent perennial rising from thick, spreading rhizomes. Among the false dragonheads the species stands out for unusually dark, glossy green leaves and cool purplish-pink flowers streaked and spotted with darker purple, an inch long and packed into dense terminal spikes.
