The tropics, grown against the odds. Sub-tropicals bring bold leaves, vivid flowers, and a whiff of the jungle to gardens well north of the frost line, thriving through a hot Southern summer and, with a little shelter, holding on through the cold.
Two things the common names get wrong: it is not Chinese, and it is not a maple. Abutilon pictum comes from the warm river country of southern Brazil and its neighbors, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the maple lives only in the leaves, which are lobed and toothed enough to have fooled people into "flowering maple." It belongs instead to the mallow family, in good company with hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and it carries that resemblance in every five-petaled bloom.
Call it a flowering maple if you like, but there is not a drop of maple in it. Abutilon pictum belongs to the mallow family, alongside hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and only the lobed, maple-shaped leaves account for the nickname. What the leaves of 'Souvenir de Bonn' actually do is carry a wide, irregular margin of cream around their green, a variegation bold enough to earn the plant its place on looks alone. The flowers settle the matter. All season they dangle from the branches like small paper lanterns, apricot to salmon, each bell veined through with crimson, swinging on thin stalks where the hummingbirds find them. 'Souvenir de Bonn' is among the oldest abutilons still in gardens, a parlor plant out of the conservatory age, when a variegated flowering maple was the sort of thing one kept in a bright room through winter and carried out to the terrace each summer. The species hails from Brazil; the cultivar name is a keepsake of Bonn, a souvenir that outlasted whoever first carried it home. They are tender, frost being their one real enemy, and in our climate they may sail through a mild winter outdoors or die to the ground and return from the root. Either way they earn their keep, blooming spring to frost and beyond, asking only for sun, rich soil, and water enough to keep the show going. Set them where you pass close, on a patio or against a warm wall, where the lanterns can be read at eye level.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the Morton citrange is a handsome one. Like other sweet orange and trifoliate orange crosses, Morton makes an attractive ornamental evergreen, with fragrant white spring flowers and orange fruit, but the fruit here sets the cultivar apart: large, smooth-skinned, and remarkably like a true orange, with very few seeds.
A very old Chinese cultivar, almost certainly named for the capital of Hunan province where the fruit has been grown for centuries, and quite possibly carrying C. ichangensis somewhere in the parentage. That suspected ancestry would account for the cold tolerance that has made Changsha the parent stock for nearly every modern hardy citrus breeding program of consequence: Wayne Hanna's seedless work at UGA Tifton, the Arctic Frost satsuma cross out of Texas, and others still in trial.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the Keraji mandarin is a favorite of the group. A medium-sized evergreen tree with the usual fragrant white citrus flowers, Keraji follows them with what Tom McClendon, in Hardy Citrus for the Southeast, calls "small, yellow, flattened tangerines that have a sweet lemonade taste unlike any other citrus fruits." That flavor is the whole reason to grow the tree, and Keraji has proven quite hardy in Augusta, Georgia since 1997.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and Citrus taiwanica is one of the tougher evergreens of the group. A vigorous, upright, spreading, thorny tree, the Taiwan orange bears sour tangerine-to-orange fruit that is both ornamental and useful, the base of a very tasty ade. One of the hardier evergreen citrus, the tree sets good crops here in Aiken, South Carolina.
The genus name Dietes comes from the Greek for "having two relatives," a botanist's nod to the plant's kinship with both Iris and Moraea, near neighbors in the iris family. The species epithet bicolor means simply two-colored, for the soft yellow petals brushed with a dark thumbprint at the base. Between the two words, the whole plant is named for doubleness: two kin, two colors.
Erythrina × bidwillii is one of the great show-stoppers among the coral beans, a bold hybrid between the Argentine cockspur coral tree, Erythrina crista-galli, and the southeastern native coral bean, Erythrina herbacea. From that crossing comes a plant with the size and drama of the South American parent and the toughness of the North American one, throwing long spikes of vivid, tubular scarlet flowers through the summer, far larger and more sustained than either parent alone.
The limequat was born of catastrophe. After the twin freezes of 1894 and 1895 laid waste to Florida's groves, Walter T. Swingle of the United States Department of Agriculture set out to breed citrus that could shrug off a cold snap, and in 1909 he crossed the sharp little West Indian or Key lime (Citrus aurantifolia) with the round Marumi kumquat (Fortunella japonica). Named and introduced in 1913 alongside a sister seedling called Lakeland, the Eustis limequat stands among the first successful intergeneric citrus hybrids, living proof that two separate genera could be wedded and still bear generous fruit.
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.
Few flowers announce themselves the way white ginger lily does after dark. Through late summer and early fall, the tall leafy stems open dense terminal spikes of pure white flowers, each bloom shaped like a hovering butterfly with a small yellow-green stain at the throat, and each one throwing a rich, sweet perfume that carries across a warm garden in the evening air. The scent is jasmine-deep and unmistakable, the reason the flowers are gathered for perfume and personal adornment across the tropics.
This is the uncommon pink-flowered Turk's cap, a soft-toned form of the familiar scarlet Malvaviscus arboreus, a subtropical relative of the hibiscus in the mallow family, Malvaceae. The flowers carry the same charming quirk as the red kind: two to three inches long, they never open flat like a hibiscus but stay furled in a little turban, glowing here in clear pink rather than red.
Malvaviscus drummondii is the small Turk's cap, the wild, native cousin of the larger Mexican wax mallow and, for many Southern gardeners, the better plant of the two. A relative of the hibiscus in the mallow family, Malvaceae, this shrubby perennial is native to Texas, the Gulf Coast states, and on south, and grows wild in the dappled shade of woodland edges and stream banks where few other bright flowers will bloom.
'Pam Puryear' is the soft-pink small Turk's cap, a lovely departure from the usual fire-engine red of this tough native mallow. The furled, never-quite-open flowers keep the charming Turk's cap form, less than two inches long and produced without pause through the hot months, but here they glow a gentle shell pink that reads cool and quiet in the summer border.
The purple firespike answers a quiet complaint of the warm-climate gardener, that the tropical border runs to reds and hot corals and forgets the cooler end of the spectrum. Odontonema callistachyum carries erect spikes of tubular, lavender-to-amethyst flowers at the tip of nearly every branch, each spike lengthening to almost a foot as the buds open in succession from fall into spring. The genus name joins the Greek odous, a tooth, with nema, a thread, for the small toothed filaments within the bloom, while the epithet callistachyum means, simply and accurately, beautiful spike. The leaves are broad, glossy, and faintly fleshy, a lacquered dark green that holds the plant together as a handsome mound even between flushes.
Podranea ricasoliana, the pink trumpet vine or Port St. John's creeper, is a fast-growing evergreen climber from the warm regions of South Africa, a member of the trumpet-creeper family, Bignoniaceae, prized for showy, trumpet-shaped flowers.
Polygala x dalmaisiana, the sweet pea shrub, is a fast-growing evergreen hybrid of two South African species (P. oppositifolia and P. myrtifolia), grown for a nearly year-round show of orchid-like flowers on an open, informal frame.
Tibouchina granulosa, the purple glory tree, is a Brazilian showstopper long grown in Florida and the warm South, a large shrub or small tree in frost-free gardens and a root-hardy dieback perennial where winters brush freezing. Glossy, deeply pleated, prominently veined leaves set off the flowers, which come smaller but far more abundantly than those of the better-known princess flower, Tibouchina urvilleana, so the whole plant seems dusted with purple through the warm months.
A cold-hardy citrus with a Woodlanders pedigree. Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids that stand outdoors beyond the usual citrus belt, and the calamandarin is one of the toughest. Likely a hybrid of a mandarin, Citrus reticulata, and a calamondin, the calamandarin blends easy-peeling, tangerine-like fruit with the cold tolerance that calamondin brings to the cross.
Called Philippine violet, though neither Philippine nor a violet, Barleria cristata is a showy subtropical shrub that saves its display for the close of the year, opening dark blue-violet, trumpet-shaped flowers through late summer and autumn when much of the garden is winding down. A perennial in zones 8 and 9 and a four-to-six-foot shrub in zone 10, native to India and Myanmar.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
24–30 in.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, pain relief, general wellness
