This is where a lot of gardeners find the plants they didn't know they were looking for.

Small and medium shrubs are the layer most landscapes get wrong — filled in with whatever boxwood was on sale, or left as bare mulch between bigger things. The shrubs in this collection are an argument for doing it differently. Fothergilla gardenii opens honey-scented white bottlebrush flowers in earliest spring, before most of the garden has even considered waking up. Kalmia latifolia — mountain laurel — builds intricate, architectural buds through the winter and then detonates in bloom in May in a way that still surprises people who've grown it for years. Itea virginica turns a shade of deep crimson in fall that doesn't look entirely real. Illicium floridanum (Florida Anise) holds its evergreen composure through heat, shade, and dry spells that knock out fussier things.

Most of these are native small shrubs of the American Southeast, plants that belong in this climate and support it — the insects, the birds, the soil life underneath. Some are uncommon enough that you won't find them anywhere else in the mail-order trade.

Grown by hand in Aiken, South Carolina and shipped across the country. Rare native shrubs for sale, from a nursery that has been finding and growing the good ones since 1979.