Hypericum lloydii

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.

The species wears two very different faces, and Woodlanders offers the less familiar of the pair. In the sandhills of South Carolina the plant grows on dry, open sand as a very low, usually prostrate mat. Just to the west, on the heavier Piedmont clay, grows a far more upright form that builds into a dense shrub a couple of feet tall, and that is the plant offered here, a form we are not aware of having been sold before.

In the wild Lloyd's St. John's Wort ranges from Virginia and South Carolina south to central Alabama, keeping mostly to the lower Piedmont and the sandhills, where the shrub turns up in dry woodlands, along road banks, and at the edges of granite flatrocks. The common name St. John's Wort, shared across the whole genus Hypericum, reaches back to the European custom of gathering the yellow-flowered kin at the Midsummer feast of Saint John, and the genus name itself, from the Greek hyper and eikon, above and image, recalls sprigs hung over doorways and icons to guard the house.

The needle foliage and low, tidy habit make Lloyd's St. John's Wort a natural for hot, dry, sandy ground where softer plants struggle: a rock garden, a sunny sandy bank, a sandhill or pine-savanna restoration, or the front edge of a well-drained bed. Give the shrub full sun and lean soil, and set little bluestem, prickly pear, and other sandhill natives nearby for a planting that shrugs off drought.