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.
Ilex glabra, the inkberry or gallberry, is one of the finest native broadleaf evergreens of eastern North America, rooted in the sandy, acid soils of the coastal plain from Nova Scotia and New Jersey south through Florida and across the Gulf states. In wet pinelands, pocosins, and boggy edges this holly has long been a defining presence, and wherever the ground runs lean, sandy, and moist, inkberry settles in.
Ilex verticillata 'Jim Dandy' is a small shrub with an outsized job. Winterberry, the native deciduous holly, puts on one of the great shows in the winter garden, bare stems crowded with brilliant red fruit, but only female plants carry that fruit, and only when the right male blooms alongside them. 'Jim Dandy' is that male for the early-flowering winterberries, a dwarf pollinizer bred to bloom in step with them.
Ilex verticillata 'Maryland Beauty' is winterberry doing what winterberry does best, and a little more of it. This native deciduous holly loses the leaves in fall to reveal bare gray stems packed with fruit, and 'Maryland Beauty' was singled out from the northern strain for an especially heavy crop of bright red berries, a dense, glowing display that holds through the winter.
Ilex verticillata is the winterberry, the native deciduous holly grown not for evergreen leaves but for the astonishing display that comes after they fall: bare gray stems packed end to end with bright fruit, lit up across the dead of winter. 'Winter Gold' plays that trick in an unexpected color, trading the usual fire-engine red for warm gold blushed with soft orange-pink, a glowing, gentler note against snow.
Ilex verticillata 'Winter Red' is the winterberry other winterberries are measured against. A large, rounded female of the southern strain, six to ten feet high and wide, this native holly drops the summer leaves to reveal bare stems packed with profuse, glossy red berries, and where lesser clones fade, 'Winter Red' holds the color clean and bright deep into the season, right through the coldest months.
Ilex 'Raritan Chief' is a male winterberry with a long working day. A compact hybrid of the native winterberry, Ilex verticillata, and the Japanese winterberry, Ilex serrata, this deciduous holly was bred as a pollinizer rather than a show plant, and a long bloom season makes 'Raritan Chief' one of the most flexible pollinizers in the group.
Ted Stephens of Nurseries Caroliniana calls this one of his top ten favorite plants, and the reason is bloom. Indigofera amblyantha, the pink indigo, is a fast, airy, deciduous shrub from the streambanks of central China, a nitrogen-fixing legume in the vast genus Indigofera, and one of the longest-flowering hardy shrubs a Southern garden can grow.
Indigofera heterantha, the Himalayan indigo, is a graceful deciduous shrub from the mountains of the western Himalaya, a nitrogen-fixing legume grown for a long summer-into-fall run of rosy-purple pea flowers over ferny foliage. Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, notes that the species has performed admirably in his Georgia trials, and the plant has earned a quiet following among Southern gardeners for toughness and length of bloom.
The Indio mandarinquat is one of those happy accidents that citrus breeding throws up now and then, a natural cross between a mandarin (Citrus reticulata) and a kumquat (Citrus japonica) that borrows the best of both parents. From the mandarin come the size, the deep orange color, and the perfume; from the kumquat come the sweet, tender, wholly edible rind and a welcome measure of cold tolerance. The fruits hang like small golden lanterns against dark evergreen leaves through winter, oblong and glossy, and the whole tree carries a poise that belies how easy the plant is to grow.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a brilliant fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Little Henry' is the dwarf of the clan, a low, mounded selection that reaches only about three feet, packing the fragrant flowers and fiery fall color of the full-sized sweetspires into a tidy, compact plant for smaller spaces.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and brilliant fall color. 'Sarah Eve' is the exception in the family, the first pink sweetspire: the small flowers are essentially white, but they are carried on rosy-pink pedicels that tint the whole arching raceme a soft, distinctive pale pink, a color no other Itea offers.
Justicia brandegeana, the shrimp plant, is a subtropical evergreen shrub from Mexico, grown the world over for the curious, shrimp-like flower spikes that give the plant its name: arching, overlapping bracts in warm coppery orange, salmon, and rust, from which small white flowers peek like a shrimp's legs. The bracts hold their color for weeks, so a well-grown plant seems always in bloom.
Sheep laurel belongs to the heath family (Ericaceae), kin to the rhododendrons, blueberries, and pieris, and shares that family's love of cool, sour, peaty ground. The genus name honors Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist and student of Linnaeus who traveled the eastern colonies in the 1740s and sent plants and seed back to Uppsala; Linnaeus returned the compliment by fixing his pupil's name to this handsome American genus. The species epithet angustifolia simply means narrow-leaved, while caroliniana marks the southern form described from the Carolinas, distinguished by leaves softly gray-felted on their undersides.
Of all the patterned mountain laurels, 'Bullseye' plays the boldest trick with color. The cinnamon-purple buds are handsome in their own right, and when they open the flowers reveal a broad band of deep purple-maroon ringing a white throat and a clean white edge, the concentric target that gives this selection a name. 'Bullseye' belongs to Kalmia latifolia, the broadleaf evergreen native to the acid slopes of the eastern United States, and represents the golden era of Kalmia breeding led by Dr. Richard Jaynes at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, whose decades of selection gave gardeners the banded, picoteed, and richly budded laurels grown today.
This seemingly unlikely hybrid crosses the familiar mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) with the diminutive, far less known sandhill laurel (Kalmia hirsuta) of the Deep South, two species that could hardly look more different. The cross was probably first made by the late, great Alabama nurseryman Tom Dodd, Jr., and further investigated by the Connecticut Kalmia expert Dr. Richard Jaynes, whose lifetime of work did more than anyone's to bring the genus into gardens.
Kerria is a monotypic genus, a single species that stands alone in the rose family (Rosaceae), native to the mountain woodlands of China and Japan. The old-fashioned kerria has bright green, arching stems and toothed leaves, and in spring the branches light up with flowers that in the common double form look like tiny golden roses. The genus honors William Kerr, the Kew plant hunter who sent the double-flowered form back to England from Canton in the early 1800s, and in Japan the plant is beloved as yamabuki, a name woven through centuries of poetry celebrating that spring yellow.
William Kerr arrived in Guangzhou in 1803 as the first professional plant hunter posted permanently in China, dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to send back whatever the southern port cities could offer. Among his returns was a double-flowered shrub with bright yellow, pompon-like blooms, gathered from cultivation and shipped to Kew in 1805. The genus was eventually named Kerria in his honor. His later years were less distinguished, marked by an opium habit and a thinning correspondence, and he died in Ceylon in 1814. The double-flowered form he introduced, 'Pleniflora', went on to become one of the most common shrubs in Victorian gardens, present in nearly every collection of the era and still widely planted today.
'Bayou Marie' is a compact crape myrtle from the Dixie Series, a group of dwarf selections, chosen by David Chopin of Washington, Pennsylvania and introduced by Hines Nursery in California, in the same series as the purple 'New Orleans'. The flowers are the draw: abundant clusters of crinkled, crepe-textured pink blooms, each petal finished with a darker red to lavender edge that gives the whole shrub a lively, two-toned sparkle through the heat of summer.
'New Orleans' is a purple-flowered dwarf crape myrtle from the Dixie Series, a group that Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, describes as the miniature weeping crape myrtles for their low, softly cascading habit. The summer flowers are the rich violet-purple that gardeners rarely find at this small scale, crinkled and crepe-textured, borne in profusion across a mound of no more than two to three feet.
'Pixie White' is a true miniature crape myrtle, a low, compact selection that trades the usual upright tree for a small, spreading, often weeping mound. Through the warm season the plant covers the fine green foliage with clear, clean white flowers, the crinkled, crepe-textured blooms that name the whole clan, at a scale that fits the smallest garden.
