Plants that turn their faces to the light. This is the roll call for the open, sun-struck parts of the garden, the borders and banks that bake from morning to evening, where the toughest, brightest, most floriferous plants do their best work.
Salvia madrensis, the forsythia sage, is a big, robust perennial from the mountains of Mexico, grown for a late-season show of soft yellow. Broad, quilted, triangular leaves clothe stout, square, mint-family stems, and in fall the plant lifts terminal clusters of clear yellow flowers that recall a forsythia in bloom and give the sage its common name, an unusual color and a welcome one so late in the year.
Salvia mexicana, the big blue Mexican sage, is a tall, dramatic perennial grown for deep, saturated blue-violet flowers that arrive when the gardening year is winding down. The tubular blooms, set in contrasting calyces, are carried in long spikes above bold, heart-shaped leaves, and few plants bring so pure and deep a blue to the autumn garden.
Salvia microphylla 'Deltoid' is a shrubby form of the littleleaf or baby sage grown for warm salmon-coral flowers and neat, triangular, deltoid leaves. The small tubular blooms open over a long season and read as a soft coral against the fine, glossy foliage, a gentler tone than the hot scarlet of many littleleaf sages.
Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' is the famous temperature-shifting bicolor of the littleleaf sages, and the trick is worth the fame. In the cool of spring the flowers may open pure white or pure red, but as summer heat builds they turn strikingly two-tone, white below with a bold red lip, so that a single plant can carry white, red, and red-and-white flowers all at once. The show runs from late spring until frost.
Salvia uliginosa, the bog sage, is an airy, sky-blue perennial grown for clouds of clear, cool blue flowers held on tall, slender, branching stems from midsummer into fall. The species name uliginosa means of marshes, and the plant lives up to it, thriving in the moist ground most sages refuse, so the bog sage fills a niche few others in the genus can.
Few native trees announce themselves as cheerfully as Sassafras albidum, whose leaves come in three shapes on the same branch: an unlobed oval, a two-lobed mitten, and a three-lobed silhouette like a splayed hand. A member of the laurel family, Lauraceae, and kin to bay, cinnamon, and spicebush, sassafras carries aromatic oils in every part, so that a snapped twig or crushed leaf releases a warm, root-beer sweetness. The common name traces back through Spanish to the colonial Southeast, where the tree was among the first American plants shipped to Europe as a marketable medicine.
×Schimlinia floribunda is one of the rarest woody plants a gardener can grow: a deliberate intergeneric hybrid between two members of the tea family, Theaceae, uniting the fabled Franklinia alatamaha with the Asian evergreen Schima argentea. The cross marries the ornamental drama and hardiness of Franklinia with the vigor, adaptability, and evergreen constitution of Schima, and the result carries large, camellia-like white flowers, glossy foliage, and an upright, well-furnished frame. The hybrid formula name honors both parents at once, Schima and Franklinia folded into a single word.
Stauntonia hexaphylla is a handsome, vigorous evergreen climber from the woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China, grown as much for glossy year-round foliage as for the famous fruit. The palmate leaves are cut into five to seven leathery, dark-green leaflets, held on a strong, twining vine that clothes a support densely from top to bottom. A member of the Lardizabalaceae, Stauntonia counts Akebia, the chocolate vine, and Decaisnea, the blue-sausage tree, as relatives.
American snowbell is one of the quiet delights of the Southeastern wetlands, usually a graceful multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, though the plant can be trained up into a small single-trunked tree. Along streamsides and in low, wet ground from the coastal plain through the interior South, the shrub carries slender branches that hang, in spring, with rows of small, bell-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant and nodding on fine stalks so the whole plant seems trimmed in tiny lanterns.
Styrax obassia, the fragrant snowbell, is the bold-leaved cousin of the more familiar Japanese snowbell, a small deciduous tree from the mountain woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China. Where Styrax japonicus hides small bells beneath fine, layered branches, the fragrant snowbell wears large, rounded, almost tropical leaves up to eight inches across, and hangs long, drooping chains of white, bell-shaped flowers that carry a sweet perfume through the late-spring garden.
Syringa meyeri 'Palibin', the dwarf Korean lilac, is a Southern-friendly lilac with old-world charm and clouds of spring fragrance. For gardeners who have long admired the lilac's perfume but found themselves too far south to grow one with confidence, this compact deciduous shrub offers the romance of the traditional lilacs, dense clusters of icy-pink to pale lavender bloom, without the northern fussiness.
Copper Canyon daisy is a big, aromatic, autumn-flowering marigold from the mountains of southern Arizona and adjacent northern Mexico, grown as much for the scent as the show. Brush against the finely divided, fern-like foliage and the plant releases a strong, distinctive fragrance, a mix of citrus, anise, and marigold that some find intoxicating and others frankly pungent. Tagetes lemmonii builds a soft, shrubby mound three to four feet high and wider still.
Tagetes lucida is the herb that does it all. Known as Mexican tarragon, Mexican mint marigold, pericón, and, in the old Aztec tongue, yauhtli, this fragrant perennial from Mexico and Central America earns every name. The narrow, glossy, deep-green leaves carry a warm anise-tarragon scent and flavor, and in late summer and fall the plant scatters small, single, golden-yellow marigold flowers across a tidy foot-and-a-half mound.
The Thomasville citrangequat is more than a fruit tree, a living piece of Southern horticultural history. First fruited in Thomasville, Georgia, this remarkable hybrid was raised in 1909 by the legendary USDA citrus breeder Walter T. Swingle and formally named in 1923. The tree stands as a pioneering achievement in citrus breeding: a three-way cross combining the cold-hardy Willits citrange, itself a cross of sweet orange and trifoliate orange, with the Nagami kumquat, Fortunella margarita.
American basswood is one of the great shade and honey trees of eastern North America, a fast, stately deciduous tree with large, heart-shaped, softly toothed leaves and a broad, rounded, generous crown. Tilia americana has been cherished by Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and naturalists alike, and goes by a string of names: linden, bee tree, and lime, though the tree is no relation to the citrus lime. In late spring and early summer, hanging clusters of pale yellow, sweetly fragrant flowers open and hum with bees.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
20–30 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, respiratory support, digestive health
Confederate jasmine, or star jasmine, is one of the best-loved evergreen vines of the warm South, prized for glossy dark leaves and clouds of small, star-shaped, intensely fragrant flowers. The common form wears white blooms, but this selection, which Woodlanders offers as 'Mandianum' and which may be the cultivar 'Star of Toscana', opens flowers in shades of creamy to clear yellow, an unusual and welcome color in the tribe.
'Madison' is the cold-hardy Confederate jasmine, the selection that carries the beloved evergreen vine a full zone north of where the tribe usually stops. Vigorous and twining, with glossy dark leaves and the powerfully fragrant, white, star-shaped flowers that make star jasmine famous, this form has proved hardy into USDA zone 7, well beyond the reach of the standard Trachelospermum jasminoides.
Few shrubs wear a name as plainly as this one. Odoratissimum is Latin for the most fragrant, the sweetest-scented, and sweet viburnum earns the superlative in late spring, when conical panicles of tiny white flowers open across the canopy and carry a soft, honeyed perfume on warm air. A member of the moschatel family, Adoxaceae, and a cousin of the elders and the arrowwoods, Viburnum odoratissimum ranges as a wild plant from the Himalayan foothills of India through Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam to China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, a broad Asian sweep that hints at the plant's easy adaptability in the warm garden.
Some viburnums are grown for the eye and some for the nose; the Burkwood viburnums are firmly the latter. Viburnum x burkwoodii is a cross between the intensely fragrant Viburnum carlesii and the glossy evergreen Viburnum utile, first raised by the brothers Burkwood and their partner Skipwith at their nursery near Kingston-on-Thames in England in 1924. 'Park Farm Hybrid' is a sister seedling from that same celebrated work, selected for a bolder flower and a deeper bud.
A tough, glossy evergreen born of two Chinese parents and a Prague nursery. Viburnum x pragense is the cross of the leatherleaf viburnum, Viburnum rhytidophyllum, with the service viburnum, Viburnum utile, first raised by the plantsman Josef Vik at the Municipal Nurseries of Prague in 1955 and named for the city in 1959. The epithet pragense simply means of Prague, a rare instance of a garden hybrid carrying a birthplace rather than a botanist.
