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.
This striking, rather upright gardenia is a Woodlanders introduction that has since become more widely available, grown less for bloom than for the boldly marked leaves. Each glossy leaf is splashed and margined in strong yellow, so the whole shrub reads as a soft fountain of gold and green, a rare thing among broadleaf evergreens and a bright note for a shaded corner.
Every collection has its unnamed treasures, and this gardenia is one of ours: a plant grown from seed gathered on Emei Shan, the great sacred mountain of Sichuan in southwestern China. The species has not been pinned down, but the plant is unmistakably a gardenia, upright in habit and clothed in long, narrow, glossy dark green leaves quite unlike the broad foliage of the common Cape jasmine.
Grevillea rosmarinifolia is a fine-textured Australian evergreen, a rounded to semi-prostrate shrub whose narrow, deep green leaves look uncannily like rosemary, giving the plant both the species name and a handsome, needled presence the year round. The likeness is only skin-deep, for this is a member of the protea family, Proteaceae, worlds away from any herb.
Firebush earns the name honestly. From late spring until the first frost, the arching branch tips carry tight clusters of slender tubular flowers in hot orange-red, each one a narrow torch held out for the hummingbirds and butterflies that work the plant from morning to dusk. The foliage plays along: new leaves and stems flush bronze to burgundy, the veins stained red, so that even between flushes of bloom the whole shrub reads warm. Few plants pull in as much winged traffic through the heat of a southern summer.
'Annabelle' is a wild American shrub with a hometown. Around 1910 two sisters, Harriet and Amy Kirkpatrick, spotted an unusually full-flowered smooth hydrangea in the woods of Union County, Illinois, dug the plant, and grew it in their garden in the town of Anna. For half a century the shrub passed hand to hand around southern Illinois as a nameless local treasure, until the University of Illinois plantsman Dr. Joseph C. McDaniel traced the trail back to Anna in the 1960s, selected the plant, and released it for sale in 1962. The name 'Annabelle' honors both the town and the Kirkpatrick belles who found the shrub: Anna plus belle.
'All Summer Beauty' answers the oldest complaint about mophead hydrangeas: that a single hard freeze or an eager pruner can wipe out a whole season of bloom. Where classic bigleaf hydrangeas flower only on old wood, this compact selection, three to four feet high and wide, blooms on both old and new growth, so the rounded heads keep coming through the season and return even after a winter that kills the older stems. The name is a promise the plant generally keeps.
'Mariesii' is a piece of hydrangea history still in commerce. In the late 1870s the English plant hunter Charles Maries, collecting in Japan for the famous Veitch nursery, sent home the first lacecap hydrangea to reach the West, at a time when European gardeners knew only the round mopheads. That introduction, named 'Mariesii' in his honor, opened Western eyes to the wild, flat-topped grace of the lacecap and became the parent of a whole line of classic cultivars, among them 'Mariesii Grandiflora', 'Mariesii Lilacina', and the blue 'Mariesii Perfecta'.
Hypericum densiflorum earns the name densiflorum, densely flowered, in high summer, when the twiggy shrub disappears under rounded clusters of small golden flowers, each one a starburst of fine stamens above five clean yellow petals. Bees work the blooms from July into September, and as the show fades the narrow dark green leaves turn a warm yellow, giving way in winter to reddish, lightly peeling bark on the older stems.
Hypericum edisonianum is a Florida endemic with an upright, colony-forming habit, sending up reddish-brown stems clothed in small, leathery, gray-green leaves and topped in the warm months with four-petaled yellow flowers, each brushed with a dense tuft of stamens. As the stems age the bark peels away in thin strips, a subtle textural detail on a shrub that spreads by clonal growth into a low thicket.
Hypericum frondosum 'Sunburst' is the garden-refined face of a tough native shrub, a compact, rounded selection that mounds to about three feet and fills each summer with powderpuff golden flowers, the largest in the species at nearly two inches across, each a dense brush of stamens over broad yellow petals. The leaves are a cool blue-green, and as the season turns the older stems reveal red-brown, exfoliating bark, so the shrub keeps a quiet interest well past bloom.
Hypericum kalmianum is the tidy, cold-hardy member of the clan, a compact rounded shrub barely knee-high, densely branched, with narrow bluish-green leaves set in pairs along curiously four-angled stems. From July into September the plant disappears under bright golden flowers, each a shallow cup filled with a full boss of stamens, the bloom arriving in the heat of summer when the color is most welcome.
Hypericum lloydii is one of the fine-textured St. John's Worts, a low, wiry evergreen shrub clothed in needle-like leaves so slender that the plant carries a heathery, almost coniferous look. Through the summer the stems light up with showy yellow flowers, each a shallow cup packed with stamens, held above foliage that stays green through the year.
Hypericum myrtifolium is the tidy, blue-leaved member of the group, an evergreen shrub whose small, leathery leaves clasp the stems in neat overlapping ranks and carry a soft glaucous, blue-green cast. In summer the bushy little frame fills with bright yellow flowers, each one a shallow cup brimming with stamens, the show carried on a plant that looks more like a miniature tree than a scrambling subshrub.
Hypericum prolificum lives up to the name, prolific, disappearing each summer under a heavy crop of bright yellow flowers, each three-quarters of an inch to an inch across and stuffed with a golden brush of stamens. The shrub is dense and rounded, with arching branches, narrow shiny leaves, and reddish, exfoliating bark that peels to show paler layers once the foliage thins.
Hypericum stans is the four-petaled member of the family, a small, upright shrub to about three feet with broad, clasping, blue-green leaves and shreddy, peeling bark. Through summer the stems carry bright yellow flowers an inch across, and where most St. John's Worts open five petals, these show four, set in a neat cross above a pair of large leafy sepals.
Ilex glabra 'Nigra' is the inkberry chosen for good looks in every season, a compact, rounded evergreen holly with unusually rich, dark green leaves. Where the wild inkberry can bronze and dull through a hard winter, this selection was picked to hold a deeper, cleaner green, and the smooth, spineless foliage stays handsome on a tidy frame that runs lower and denser than the run of the species.
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.
