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.
Oblongleaf twinflower, Dyschoriste oblongifolia, is a low, spreading wildflower of the American Southeast, a member of the acanthus family that carpets the dry pine flatwoods, sandhills, and open savannas of Florida and neighboring states. The common name comes from the habit of carrying the small, funnel-shaped flowers in pairs, twinned in the leaf axils along low stems, while the botanical epithet oblongifolia simply describes the neat, oblong leaves. An older regional name is snakeherb, a tag shared across the genus Dyschoriste.
Some plants are grown for beauty; a few are grown for the story of their survival, and Echinacea tennesseensis, the Tennessee coneflower, is one of the latter. Endemic to a handful of limestone cedar glades around Nashville, the species was once believed extinct, then rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century clinging to those thin, sun-baked soils. The Tennessee coneflower went on to become one of the first plants ever listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and after decades of protection and propagation was formally delisted in 2011, recovered. To grow this coneflower is to keep a small piece of that comeback going.
Anacua, Ehretia anacua, is one of the signature small trees of the south Texas brush country and the lower Rio Grande, a member of the borage family that goes by a small crowd of names. The rough, sandpapery upper surface of the leaves earns the tag sandpaper tree, while old-timers along the border call the tree anacua or, corrupted through generations, knockaway. Evergreen to semi-evergreen depending on the winter, the anacua holds dark green, leathery leaves that feel like fine grit under a thumb.
Elliottia racemosa, the Georgia plume, is one of the rarest and most coveted of all southeastern native plants, a deciduous shrub or small tree that lifts great feathery plumes of white flowers in the heat of summer. First found by the naturalist William Bartram in 1775 and named for the botanist Stephen Elliott, this member of the heath family grows wild in only a scattering of Georgia localities and almost nowhere else on earth. To grow one is to hold a genuine botanical treasure.
A relic of the old Southern wilds, Erythrina herbacea, the coral bean, is a plant that commands attention, graceful yet defiant, wild yet refined. A legume native across the coastal Southeast, the coral bean shifts habit with the winter: in frost-free zones the plant grows as a woody shrub, branching boldly above the ground, while farther north the top dies down with the first hard freeze, only to rise again from a thick, gnarled rootstock when the heat returns, an emblem of Southern resilience.
The 'De Soto' coral bean is an extremely rare white-flowered form of the familiar southeastern native Erythrina herbacea, whose usual dress is fire-engine scarlet. Where the wild coral bean lights the spring with red, this selection raises the same slender, tubular spires in clean, cool white, a startling and lovely departure that Woodlanders introduced some years ago and is pleased to offer again.
In the quiet understory of the Eastern woodlands grows a shrub of subtle grace and striking autumn drama: Euonymus americanus, the American strawberry bush, known just as fondly by the folk name hearts-a-bustin'. This native, deciduous to semi-evergreen shrub sends up slender, distinctly green, angular stems clad in opposite, lance-shaped leaves to about three inches long. Through spring and summer the plant keeps to the shade of oak, hickory, and pine, quietly content in fertile, moist, well-drained soil.
The American beech is one of the great presences of the eastern woods, a large, slow-growing deciduous tree that ranges through rich forests from southern Canada to the Gulf. Toothed oval leaves, several inches long, emerge a clean bright green, turn clear yellow in fall and then a warm russet-brown, and cling to the branches through much of winter, a habit called marcescence that gives the bare woods a soft papery whisper. The trunk is the signature: smooth, silver-gray, and elephantine, so inviting that generations have carved their initials into the living bark, a temptation best resisted since the wounds never truly heal.
Swamp privet, Forestiera acuminata, is a native deciduous shrub or small tree of the wet South, at home in the flood-prone bottoms and streambanks from Texas east to South Carolina and up the Mississippi Valley as far as Illinois and Indiana. A member of the olive family, Oleaceae, and a distant cousin of the true privets, the plant shrugs off standing water and seasonal flooding with an ease few woody plants can match.
Forestiera angustifolia 'Weeping' is a distinctive pendulous form of the Texas desert olive, an intricately branched native shrub whose cascading, weeping branches make it a living piece of sculpture. Fine and twiggy, clothed in small narrow leaves, the plant drapes and tumbles in a way the wild shrub never does, and reveals a fine tracery of branches in winter once the leaves have fallen. Tough as the Texas brush country that bore it, this is a plant grown as much for form as for foliage, and a favorite subject for bonsai.
'Sea Spray' has long traveled under the name Fothergilla major, a tidy assumption the botanists have since complicated. Run through a flow cytometer, the plant turns out to be a hybrid, F. × intermedia, the meeting of mountain witch-alder (F. major) and the dwarf coastal F. gardenii, the little shrub Charleston's Alexander Garden sent across to England in the 1760s, in a genus already named for John Fothergill, the London physician who tried to grow half of America in a single garden. All of which makes the name, for once, honest. Most Sea Spray christenings are wishful; this one actually carries the coast in the blood.
Fothergilla gardenii is a small deciduous shrub, usually three to four feet tall, and a native of the southeastern coastal plain, where the plant haunts moist, peaty pinelands and bogs. A member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, and a close cousin of the witch-hazels themselves, dwarf fothergilla shares the family gift for honey-scented late-winter and spring bloom on bare or barely-leafed stems.
The native fothergillas were choice but scarcely available garden shrubs when Woodlanders first began to offer them back in 1980. This one, a hybrid of Fothergilla gardenii and F. major, was found by Dr. Michael Dirr at the Mt. Airy Arboretum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has since become the most widely grown fothergilla of all, and deservedly so.
This is the wild strawberry of eastern North America, Fragaria virginiana, the modest little groundcover that carpets sunny woodland edges, old fields, and roadside banks across the continent. Trifoliate, serrated leaves rise in low tufts, and slender runners reach out to root new plantlets at their tips, so that a single crown becomes a colony in a season or two.
Few plants carry a story like the Franklin tree. Collected from the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia by John and William Bartram in the 1760s and named by them for their friend Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia alatamaha was last seen growing wild around 1803 and has never been found in nature since. Every Franklinia alive today, in every garden and arboretum on earth, descends from the seed the Bartrams carried home to Philadelphia. To grow one is to hold a living piece of that lineage.
Gelsemium rankinii is one of the South's gentler mysteries, a twining, semi-evergreen vine that has long threaded through the quiet wetlands and river margins of the Gulf Coast. Where other vines sprawl boldly, the swamp jessamine moves with a kind of restraint, weaving through shrubs and small trees on glossy, fine-textured foliage, with a poise born of deep, humid landscapes.
Carolina jessamine is the twining gold of the Southern spring, native to the southern United States and honored as the state flower of South Carolina. An evergreen vine of easy grace, the plant clothes a fence or trellis in glossy, narrow leaves and, as winter loosens, opens a wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that scent the whole garden.
'Pride of Augusta' is the old double-flowered Carolina jessamine, a twining evergreen vine that turns the familiar Southern gold into something fuller and more lavish. Where the wild species opens simple funnels, this selection packs each bloom with extra petals, so the vine carries a long, generous show of ruffled, double yellow flowers, sweetly fragrant, from late winter into early spring.
Carolina jessamine is the state flower of South Carolina and one of the most beloved evergreen vines of the South, prized for the wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that opens the gardening year. 'Margarita' is the cold-hardy answer to that beauty, a selection that carries the same sweet-scented gold well north of where the species usually gives out.
