For most of botanical history the genus Parrotia was thought to hold a single species, the Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica) of the Caspian forests. Then came a small Chinese tree with a long and tangled paper trail. A fruiting specimen gathered in Jiangsu Province in 1935 sat in a herbarium drawer until 1960, when the botanist H.T. Chang described the specimen as a witch-hazel under the name Hamamelis subaequalis. The living tree, meanwhile, had vanished. The species was presumed extinct for half a century, until a 1988 expedition found the tree again, and only in the late 1990s did DNA settle the question once and for all: no witch-hazel at all, but a second Parrotia, sibling to the Persian across some 3,500 miles of Asia.
Two Hall of Fame inductions hang on Leslie Ann's lineage, though neither is for a flower. The award stamped on her record, the Ralph Peer Sasanqua Award, carries the name of the man who in 1923 hauled recording equipment south to Atlanta and captured the first commercial sides of country and blues. Ralph Peer pioneered field recording and sits in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame, then turned that same restless curatorial instinct on camellias late in life, founding the Los Angeles Camellia Society in 1948 and rising to president of the American Camellia Society by 1957. The man who recorded the Carter Family also decided which sasanquas deserved to be remembered. In 1961, one of them was this one.
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.
The gardenia needs no introduction in the South; the scent alone has been stopping people in driveways for generations. What 'Chuck Hayes' adds to that old story is nerve in the cold. The line traces back to the late 1970s and a Virginia Beach nurseryman named Charlie Hayes, who noticed a single-flowered gardenia that had come through a brutal freeze unbothered. He crossed that survivor with a double-flowered plant and handed the seedlings to Dan Milbocker, a horticulturist at the Hampton Roads research station, who grew them out, picked the toughest, and eventually released the plant under Hayes's name. The result is a fully double, classically fragrant gardenia that behaves as a far more delicate shrub has no right to.
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.
Baccharis halimifolia is a plant of edges and thresholds, growing where the land loosens and blurs into water: salt marsh margins, ditches, tidal creeks, and back dunes. In fall, when most things are shutting down, the groundsel bush erupts into a soft storm of white seed fluff, like a marsh firework frozen mid-explosion. This is the shrub that coastal Louisiana calls manglier, that botanists call groundsel bush or eastern baccharis, and that local healers have quietly trusted for generations.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–10 ft.
Spread
5–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, immune support, detoxification & cleansing, general wellness
Oleander, Nerium oleander, is the great sun-loving evergreen of the Mediterranean, grown since antiquity for a long summer of bloom, with dark green, leathery, lance-shaped leaves in whorls of three along long, sparingly branched stems. 'Hardy Pink' is one of the cold-tougher selections, carrying showy, lightly fragrant clusters of clear rose-pink flowers from late spring well into fall.
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
Every winterberry covered in red is hiding a secret, and his name is ‘Southern Gentleman’. Winterberry hollies are dioecious, male and female on separate plants, and only the pollinated females set the blazing red fruit the species is grown for. No male nearby, no berries. ‘Southern Gentleman’ is the male who makes the show possible, and asks for none of the credit.
Calycanthus floridus 'Athens', also circulated under the name 'Katherine', is a yellow-flowered selection of the Eastern sweetshrub, a deciduous native of the Southeastern woodlands long grown for fragrance, adaptability, and strange, many-tepaled flowers. Where the wild plant blooms a deep maroon, 'Athens' opens soft, buttery yellow, an unexpected and elegant turn on a familiar shrub.
The name is a promise the tree keeps only at the very end of the year. Coccinea is Latin for scarlet, and scarlet oak earns it in late October, well after the other oaks have turned and dropped, when the whole crown ignites into a clean, carrying red that holds for weeks and can be seen across a valley. On a good tree in the right soil, this is the best fall color the genus offers, which is saying something.
This is a Woodlanders plant in the most literal sense: selected, named, and introduced to the American nursery trade by this nursery, in this town, decades ago. The cultivar now carries our name across the country. One Green World in Oregon, Cistus on Sauvie Island, Greenleaf as a national wholesaler, Wilson Bros in three-gallon, Cloud Mountain Farm in Washington, Dancing Oaks in the Willamette Valley, and dozens of regional nurseries from Louisiana to Idaho all carry the plant. Few cultivars in American horticulture are so permanently tied to a single small nursery in Aiken, South Carolina. To buy here is to buy at the source.
The southern maidenhair has a way of choosing impossible places. Look for this fern on a shaded limestone bluff where water seeps through the rock, or in the spray zone of a spring-fed creek, and you will likely find the fronds growing sideways out of a crevice as if that were the most natural thing in the world. The wiry black stems hold up fan-shaped pinnules so thin they seem almost translucent in morning light, and the whole plant trembles at the slightest breath of air. Few native ferns carry this much delicacy with so little fuss.
Endemic to the mountain scrub of Madagascar, where the plant scrambles along slopes between two and six thousand feet, Buddleja madagascariensis throws out long arching canes that will climb to ten feet given a wall to lean on. The flowers come in late winter and spring on terminal panicles up to ten inches long, opening deep yellow and aging through orange to soft pink along the same spike, all of it carrying a honeyed fragrance strong enough to scent a courtyard. The leaves are narrowly ovate, dark green above, silvery and felted beneath, so the whole shrub seems to flicker when wind moves through the canes.
The southern shield fern carries a longer pedigree than most ferns in cultivation. The type specimen was collected by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland near Cumanacoa, in the cloud-shrouded country around Caripe in northeastern Venezuela, during their five-year expedition through the equinoctial Americas. Decades later the German botanist Carl Sigismund Kunth, Humboldt's assistant in Paris and the man who would spend years describing the ten thousand and more specimens the explorers shipped home, became the namesake when Nicaise Auguste Desvaux formally described the species in 1827 as Nephrodium kunthii. C.V. Morton moved the fern into Thelypteris in 1967, and recent molecular work (Fawcett and Smith, 2021) has shifted the name again into Pelazoneuron, though the older binomial remains the one in common horticultural use.
In the forests of the Himalayan foothills and across monsoon Asia grows a fig of ancient bearing, Ficus roxburghii, known to botanists today as Ficus auriculata and to gardeners as the elephant-ear fig. This is no dainty exotic. In the tropics the plant makes a bold small tree; in the American South, where hard frost cuts back the top, the fig returns from the root each year as a heroic perennial, with a presence as memorable as a live oak draped in Spanish moss.
