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.
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.
Some plants stand quietly in the garden, and some speak. Vitex agnus-castus has been speaking for more than two thousand years, from sun-washed Mediterranean shores to monastery cloisters, from the herbals of ancient Greece to the borders of Southern gardens. In Homer's day the fragrant leaves and lavender flower spikes were woven into ritual garlands. The Romans knew the shrub as the chaste tree, a name wrapped in legend, since the peppery seeds were once thought to cool passion, which earned the seeds the cloister nickname of monk's pepper. The double name says as much twice over: agnus is Latin for lamb and castus for chaste, while the genus Vitex comes from vieo, to weave, a nod to the pliant branches once bent into baskets.
A superior selection of the ancient chaste tree, chosen for the size and color of the bloom. Vitex agnus-castus 'Shoal Creek' is a deciduous large shrub or small tree, native in the species to southern Europe and western Asia and long grown across the South for a long season of summer flower. The palmate, aromatic leaves have now and then been mistaken for those of cannabis, a passing resemblance that gives the plant a certain conversational charm.
A tough, salt-defying seaside groundcover with a serious caveat. Vitex rotundifolia, best known as beach vitex, is a low, prostrate, trailing shrub of the mint family, native to the coasts of eastern Asia, the Pacific islands, and Australia, where the plant binds shifting sand along the shore. Rounded, blue-green leaves about two inches across clothe the running stems, aromatic and slightly spicy when crushed, and spikes of bright lavender-blue flowers open in late summer.
A brightly variegated cousin of the chaste tree, grown for foliage as much as flower. Vitex trifolia, sometimes called the three-leaf chaste tree or Arabian lilac, is a warm-climate shrub of the mint family, native along tropical and subtropical coasts from eastern Africa through southern Asia to Australia and the Pacific. The species name trifolia points to the leaves, usually held in threes, and the selection 'Variegata' edges each gray-green leaflet in creamy white for a cool, luminous effect.
A native tree that bites back, and can numb a toothache. Zanthoxylum clava-herculis, the toothache tree or Hercules' club, is a small to medium deciduous tree of the citrus family, native along the coastal Southeast from Virginia to Florida and Texas. The genus name Zanthoxylum means yellow wood, and the species clava-herculis, the club of Hercules, names the stout, spiny, club-shaped trunk that is the tree's signature.
