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.
To see Styrax japonicus properly you have to look up. The leaves ride along the tops of the branches, all turned to the sky, while underneath, in late spring, hang rows of small white bells on slender stalks, so the whole horizontal tier of the tree seems lit from below. Stand beneath one in bloom and the common name explains itself.
The Sunquat began as an accident in a Beeville, Texas dooryard in the early 1940s, when a man named Leslie Cude noticed a seedling carrying fruit that looked like a small lemon and behaved like a kumquat. Walter Swingle, the great citrus authority of the day, took one look and guessed a cross of Meyer lemon and kumquat, which is where the name Lemonquat comes from and how it entered the collections as Citrus limon × Fortunella. The trouble is that the curators who have kept the tree at Riverside ever since have come to doubt him. The fruit, they think, points to a mandarin somewhere in the parentage rather than a lemon, which would make the plant a mandarinquat wearing the wrong label. Nobody has settled the question. The plant has gone out as Sunquat, Lemonquat, Lemondrop, and Marmaladequat, four names for one tree, each a different theory and not one of them proven. Asking a citrus to hold still long enough to be classified rather misunderstands the family.
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium, the aromatic aster, saves the best of the season for last. Long after most perennials have folded, this tough native throws up a low, spreading mound of stiff, well-branched stems and buries the whole clump under small violet-blue daisies, each lit with a bright gold eye, from early fall well into November. The show arrives just as the garden goes quiet, and the flowers hum with the last bees and butterflies of the year.
A Victorian-era English selection of one of the great trees of North America. The species, Thuja plicata, the western red cedar, is the dominant conifer of the Pacific Northwest coastal rainforest, the tree that towers 150 to 200 feet above the forest floor in old-growth stands of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California, with individual specimens documented at over a thousand years old. To the Coast Salish, Haida, Tlingit, Kwakwaka'wakw, and other Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples, western red cedar is the Tree of Life: the wood used for longhouses, dugout canoes, totem poles, and ceremonial regalia; the bark woven into baskets, mats, capes, and dress; the whole tree a structural and cultural foundation for thousands of years. That natural rot-resistance comes from the same volatile terpenoids that give the crushed foliage a sweet, cedary fragrance, the smell of the Pacific Northwest forest itself.
This variegated form of Confederate jasmine, or star jasmine, is grown as much for the foliage as the flowers. Each leathery, evergreen leaf is bordered and splashed with creamy white, often flushed pink in cool weather, and the leaves run larger than on most forms of Trachelospermum jasminoides, so the vine reads as a soft, marbled cloud of green and cream on a fence or trellis even out of bloom.
This is a Trachelospermum, one of the star jasmines, offered here as an unnamed selection. Like others in the genus, the plant is a twining, self-clinging evergreen vine with glossy, leathery, dark-green leaves that clothe a fence, trellis, or arbor in dense green through the year and take readily to clipping into a clean, structured cover.
They carry their Roman name almost unchanged. Tinus was what the Romans called the shrub two thousand years ago, the name Pliny the Elder set down in his Natural History, and when Linnaeus came to catalogue them he simply kept it. The reason gardeners have held onto Viburnum tinus just as long is that they flower in the cold. While the rest of the garden is shut down for winter, they cover themselves in tight clusters of deep carmine buds that open a few at a time across weeks into small white flowers, so they carry both colors at once through the bleakest stretch of the year. The foliage is the second argument, dense and dark and glossy, evergreen to the ground with none of the gapping that lesser shrubs fall into. 'Spring Bouquet' is the compact, well-behaved selection, rounding into a tidy four to six feet, which makes it the one to reach for when you want a hedge, a low screen, or a piece of evergreen structure that also happens to bloom in February. Metallic blue-black berries follow for the birds, set best when more than one plant grows nearby. They take shade, salt, and coastal wind without complaint. Few evergreens hand you this much in the dead of winter, which is precisely the season you'll be grateful for it.
Woodlanders has long been a leader in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the 'Razzlequat' is one of the odder and hardier of the lot. The plant is a cross between the Australian desert lime, Eremocitrus glauca, a tough, drought- and cold-tolerant native of the arid Australian interior, and, most likely, the familiar 'Meyer' lemon. From the desert lime parent come thorny, wiry branches, small narrow gray-green leaves, and a hardiness and drought tolerance rare among citrus; from the lemon come size and flavor.
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.
A modern Franklin tree with year-round presence and late-summer perfume. ×Schimlinia 'Schima Lina Ding Dong' is a rare intergeneric hybrid bred to capture the romance of the lost Franklin tree while adding real garden durability. Raised by the Mountain Crop Improvement Lab at NC State, the selection crosses Franklinia alatamaha, the legendary Georgia native long gone from the wild and famous for luminous white flowers, with Schima remotiserrata, a broadleaf evergreen of the tea family from Asia. The result is an elegant evergreen carrying fragrant, white, camellia-like blooms in late summer, just when the garden most wants a fresh highlight.
A seldom-seen species with old-world charm, Abelia chinensis is a deciduous shrub native to China and one of the foundational parents of the widely grown Abelia x grandiflora. Far less common in American gardens than its hybrid offspring, the true species offers its own quiet distinctions: larger foliage, a fuller habit, and a long summer season of bloom that makes it a thoughtful choice for collectors and pollinator gardeners alike.
Abeliophyllum is a genus of a single species, first described from Korea in 1919 and grown in Western gardens since the 1930s, when it earned an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society. It belongs to the olive family beside lilac and forsythia, and in the wild it clings on at only a handful of Korean sites, where it is now protected by law as an endangered plant. This is the white-flowered species itself, the parent of the better-known pink form.
A medium to large deciduous shrub closely related to the native buttonbush, Adina rubella wears smaller leaves and bears similar but daintier flowers: round, scented heads of pale pink and white, each bristling with styles into a small Sputnik, carried over a long season from early summer well into fall. The pincushion blooms draw bees and butterflies just as the buttonbushes do, and an open, arching habit gives the shrub a fine-textured grace.
Sweet almond verbena is grown for one glorious thing above all: scent. From midsummer until hard frost, Aloysia virgata tips every branch with slender spikes of small white flowers that pour out an intoxicating vanilla-almond fragrance, strongest in the late afternoon and evening and carrying clear across a garden. Butterflies and hummingbirds work the spikes all season.
Swamp milkweed brings beauty and biodiversity to the moist garden. Asclepias incarnata is a native perennial prized for domed clusters of rosy pink, vanilla-scented flowers and for a vital role in feeding pollinators, native to wet meadows, streambanks, and lowland prairies across much of North America. The plant takes happily to rain gardens, wet soils, and sunny borders alike, a natural for the ecologically minded gardener.
The white-flowered form of swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata 'Ice Ballet' carries the same upright, well-mannered habit as the species but trades rosy pink for clusters of pure, cool white, held atop sturdy three-to-four-foot stems through summer. The effect is fresh and luminous in a moist border, and just as useful to wildlife.
Aromatic aster is the toughest and most fragrant of the fall asters, and 'Raydon's Favorite' is the classic selection. Aster oblongifolius 'Raydon's Favorite' forms a dense, rounded mound of small leaves that release a clean, balsam-like scent when brushed, and in early to mid fall vanishes under a haze of lavender-blue, gold-centered daisies.
Bejaria racemosa, the tarflower, is one of the odd and lovely surprises of the Florida scrub, a heath-family shrub that looks nothing like the rest of the clan. Where blueberries and azaleas carry small, fused, bell-shaped blooms, tarflower opens wide flowers of seven separate petals, white to soft pink and sweetly fragrant, held in loose summer racemes. The genus honors the eighteenth-century Spanish botanist Jose Bejar, and though older books spell the name Befaria, botanists have since settled on Bejaria.
Crossvine is a vigorous, semi-evergreen native climber that ascends by tendrils and adhesive holdfasts, and var. atrosanguinea is the red one: where the typical crossvine flowers orange, this striking selection, introduced by Woodlanders, carries abundant deep red to red-purple trumpets, often over narrower, longer leaves. The flowers even smell faintly of mocha on a warm day.
Buddleia alternifolia, the fountain or alternate-leaf butterfly bush, stands apart from the usual butterfly-bush crowd. A deciduous shrub native to northwestern China, the fountain butterfly bush is the most cold-hardy of the genus, and is grown above all for a weeping form and an early-season flood of fragrant, lavender-purple bloom.
