The shrubs that furnish a garden. Small and medium shrubs are the versatile, human-scaled woody plants that fill borders, edge paths, and knit the taller structure to the ground, the layer most gardens rely on most.
Sarcococca ruscifolia, the fragrant sweet box, is an evergreen shrub of the boxwood family, native to China and East Asia, grown for a winter perfume that belies the tiny flowers that carry it. In late winter and early spring the small, creamy white flowers open along the glossy stems, easy to overlook by eye but powerfully sweet on the air, and unlike the black-fruited sweet boxes, this species follows the flowers with glowing red berries.
Among the winter-flowering shade shrubs, few reward a cold-season garden as generously as Sarcococca wallichii, the Himalayan sweet box. The genus name joins the Greek sarco, flesh, with kokkos, berry, a nod to the fleshy fruits that follow the flowers, while the species honors Nathaniel Wallich, the Danish surgeon-botanist who superintended the Calcutta botanic garden in the early nineteenth century and sent so many Himalayan plants west. Sarcococca belongs to the box family, Buxaceae, and shares that clan's patience: dense, slow, and evergreen, with the quiet good manners of a plant built for the long haul.
American snowbell is one of the quiet delights of the Southeastern wetlands, usually a graceful multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, though the plant can be trained up into a small single-trunked tree. Along streamsides and in low, wet ground from the coastal plain through the interior South, the shrub carries slender branches that hang, in spring, with rows of small, bell-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant and nodding on fine stalks so the whole plant seems trimmed in tiny lanterns.
Syringa meyeri 'Palibin', the dwarf Korean lilac, is a Southern-friendly lilac with old-world charm and clouds of spring fragrance. For gardeners who have long admired the lilac's perfume but found themselves too far south to grow one with confidence, this compact deciduous shrub offers the romance of the traditional lilacs, dense clusters of icy-pink to pale lavender bloom, without the northern fussiness.
Copper Canyon daisy is a big, aromatic, autumn-flowering marigold from the mountains of southern Arizona and adjacent northern Mexico, grown as much for the scent as the show. Brush against the finely divided, fern-like foliage and the plant releases a strong, distinctive fragrance, a mix of citrus, anise, and marigold that some find intoxicating and others frankly pungent. Tagetes lemmonii builds a soft, shrubby mound three to four feet high and wider still.
A brightly variegated cousin of the chaste tree, grown for foliage as much as flower. Vitex trifolia, sometimes called the three-leaf chaste tree or Arabian lilac, is a warm-climate shrub of the mint family, native along tropical and subtropical coasts from eastern Africa through southern Asia to Australia and the Pacific. The species name trifolia points to the leaves, usually held in threes, and the selection 'Variegata' edges each gray-green leaflet in creamy white for a cool, luminous effect.
A charming citrus hybrid for containers, winter patios, and kitchen harvests. Known as the calamondin orange, x Citrofortunella mitis 'Calamondin' is a compact, cold-tolerant citrus treasured for abundant fragrant blossoms, ornamental good looks, and tart, edible fruit. A natural cross between the mandarin orange, Citrus reticulata, and the kumquat, Fortunella, calamondin is equally at home on a patio or in a bright kitchen window, offering both beauty and bounty the year round.
Yuzu Ichandrin is not a lemon. This is something older and considerably more interesting, a naturally occurring hybrid between Ichang papeda, Citrus ichangensis, and Satsuma mandarin, long cultivated across the high-elevation citrus regions of China and Japan, and among the most cold-hardy citrus in existence. Where standard yuzu, Citrus junos, and true lemons would surrender to a Southern winter, Ichandrin holds. Mature, established trees have come through ten degrees Fahrenheit with nothing worse than tip dieback. This is, by any honest measure, the citrus a zone 7 or 8 gardener actually gets to keep.
A rare gem of the Southeastern coastal plain, chosen for the bluest foliage of the tribe. Zenobia pulverulenta 'Woodlanders Blue' is a semi-evergreen shrub of the heath family, native to the pocosins and pine savannas of the coastal Carolinas, and grown above all for striking powder-blue, glaucous foliage and hanging clusters of white, bell-shaped flowers in early summer. Woodlanders selected and introduced this exceptionally blue form, which has since won wider recognition.
