The garden under the canopy. Shade is not a problem to solve but a place to plant, and these are the ferns, foliage plants, and quiet bloomers that make the cool, dim ground beneath trees and walls into one of the loveliest parts of a garden.
Camellia gigantocarpa is a rare and remarkable species from the subtropical forests of southern China, first documented in the wild in the 1980s in Guangxi Province. The name says the essential thing: gigantocarpa, giant fruit. Where most camellias are grown for flowers, this species is prized above all for the great woody seed capsules that follow them, among the largest in the entire genus.
Carpinus caroliniana is a native tree that hides its best feature in plain sight, a smooth, gray, sinewy bark that ripples over the trunk like the muscles of a flexed arm, giving the common names musclewood and ironwood. This small, slow, dense understory tree of eastern North America carries fine, birch-like leaves and a rounded, layered crown. The wood beneath that muscled bark is famously hard and heavy, the reason ironwood stuck as a name.
Cephalotaxus harringtonia 'Fastigiata' is the columnar Japanese plum yew, a needle-leaf evergreen of distinctive upright form, the dark green, glossy needles arranged in dense whorls around stiffly erect branches like a green bottlebrush held vertical. An ancient Japanese and Korean clone, the plant occasionally throws a shoot of the flat, two-ranked foliage typical of the wild species, a quiet reminder of the parent.
Cephalotaxus harringtonia 'Prostrata' is the spreading Japanese plum yew, a low, wide-growing evergreen prized for lush, dark green, needle-like foliage and an easy way with shade. Where the species and its columnar forms stand upright, 'Prostrata' lays out horizontally, three or four feet high and twice as wide, layering into a handsome evergreen groundcover or low border.
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.
Dirca palustris, the leatherwood, is a quiet native shrub with a hidden trick: branches so supple and tough they can be bent, twisted, even tied in a knot without snapping. That remarkable pliability, born of unusually soft, low-lignin wood, gave rise to the names leatherwood and ropebark, and made the bark a favorite of Native peoples for cordage. A slow, rounded, understory shrub of rich eastern woodlands, leatherwood is seldom offered and quietly prized by those who know it.
The autumn fern, Dryopteris erythrosora, earns the common name backward: the new fronds arrive in spring the color of turning leaves, a warm copper-orange that seems borrowed from October. As those fronds age they deepen through pink and bronze and finally settle into glossy dark green, so the plant carries a hint of autumn even at the height of the growing season.
Paper bush, Edgeworthia chrysantha, spends the growing season as a quiet, blue-green shrub and saves the show for the dead of winter. In late winter and earliest spring, while the branches are still bare, the shrub hangs rounded, downward-facing clusters of small tubular flowers from the tips of every stem, silvery-furred buds opening to warm yellow throats that carry a sweet, daphne-like fragrance across cold air. A cousin of Daphne and the native leatherwood Dirca in the family Thymelaeaceae, paper bush shares the tribe's supple, hard-to-snap branches and honeyed scent.
This luminous evergreen groundcover came into gardens through Heronswood Nursery, from a collection the plantsman Dan Hinkley made on the slopes above the Wolong Panda Preserve in western China. The long, dark green, sharply pointed leaves are laced with bold silver-white veins, a ghostly netting that gives the cultivar the second half of the name and lifts a shaded corner out of the gloom.
In the dappled understory of the Eastern woods, Geranium maculatum has made a home for as long as the forests have stood. Known to generations as wild geranium or cranesbill, this native perennial forms a tidy clump of softly lobed leaves and lifts loose sprays of rose-purple, five-petaled flowers, as much a part of the old spring landscape as dogwood and trillium.
Hosta 'Tardiflora' announces the best trait in the name itself: tardiflora means late-flowering, and this small Japanese hosta is very nearly the last of the tribe to bloom, lifting lavender flowers in fall when most hostas have already finished and begun to tire. The plant traces back to the wild Hosta longipes, the long-stalked giboshi of Japan's rocky mountain slopes, where the species clings to cliffs and streambanks; 'Tardiflora' is a distinct, late seedling form long grown as a garden plant in its own right.
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.
Ilex spinigera is a holly with a deep past, a rare evergreen from the Hyrcanian forests that ring the southern Caspian Sea in northern Iran. Small, glossy, dark green leaves edged with fine spines clothe a dense small tree or large shrub, and on female plants such as this one bright red berries glow against the foliage through fall and into winter, the classic holly effect on an uncommonly ancient plant.
The anise trees, genus Illicium, are aromatic broadleaf evergreens of the star-anise family, Schisandraceae, named from the Latin illicium, an allurement, for the spicy scent the crushed leaves give off. Illicium anisatum is the Japanese anise, called shikimi in its homeland, a glossy, upright evergreen shrub or small tree with leathery, anise-scented leaves and pale creamy-yellow, star-shaped flowers in earliest spring.
Illicium floridanum, the Florida anise, is a lush evergreen shrub of the southern woods, prized for glossy, dark green leaves that release a clean anise or licorice scent when crushed. In mid-spring the plant hangs itself with curious flowers, two inches across and shaped like deep maroon starfish, their many narrow petals radiating from the center. Dense, shade-loving, and richly aromatic in leaf, Florida anise brings a bold, tropical-looking evergreen presence to a shady garden.
The anise trees, genus Illicium, are aromatic broadleaf evergreens of the star-anise family, Schisandraceae, named from the Latin illicium, an allurement, for the scent of their leaves. Illicium floridanum, the Florida anise, is the Southeast's own contribution, a shade-loving evergreen native along shaded streambanks and seepage slopes from the Florida panhandle to Louisiana. 'Halley's Comet' is one of the best selections, a vigorous but compact form with especially dark foliage and a heavy show of velvety, star-shaped flowers in deep wine-red.
The anise trees, genus Illicium, are aromatic broadleaf evergreens of the star-anise family, Schisandraceae, their Latin name meaning an allurement, for the spicy scent of the leaves. Illicium floridanum, the Florida anise, is a Southeastern native of shaded streambanks and moist ravines from Georgia to Louisiana, valued as one of the finest flowering evergreens for shade. This is a variegated selection, carrying the usual two-inch, starfish-shaped maroon flowers over foliage marked with a subtle, quiet green-on-green variegation.
Illicium floridanum var. album is the uncommon white-flowered form of the Florida anise, all the beauty and aromatic foliage of the species, with starry spring flowers of clean white in place of the usual deep maroon. Against the glossy, dark green, anise-scented leaves, the pale, many-petaled stars seem to float, lighting up a shady corner where the darker form would simply recede. A choice and seldom-seen selection, the white Florida anise is a connoisseur's evergreen for shade.
