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.
Yaupon holly is a small-leaved evergreen shrub or small tree of the southeastern United States, native from coastal Virginia south to Texas. Adaptable to a fault, salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and willing in sun or shade, yaupon takes shearing as gracefully as any boxwood, which has made the species a Southern mainstay for hedges, topiary, and clipped evergreen structure. The tiny white spring flowers are easy to miss, but the bees do not miss them, and on female plants they give way to a heavy crop of small, translucent berries that hang on well into winter.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–10 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, mental & emotional well-being, detoxification & cleansing
The genus is the one that turned the Lowcountry blue. Indigofera gave colonial South Carolina its great cash crop alongside rice, the dye that Eliza Lucas Pinckney coaxed into commercial cultivation around Charleston in the 1740s and that filled the colony's coffers for a generation, made with skill drawn largely from enslaved West Africans. That fortune rested on a tropical cousin, Indigofera tinctoria, but the family trait runs through the whole genus, and the leaves of this one will give up the same blue if you care to steep them. We grow the plant for the flowers instead.
No genus carries more Carolina history in its name than this one. Indigofera means indigo-bearing, and indigo was the blue that built the colonial Lowcountry: in the 1740s a young Eliza Lucas Pinckney coaxed a successful crop out of the land around Charleston, and for a generation the dye stood second only to rice among the colony's exports, made with skill drawn largely from enslaved West Africans, until the Revolution cut the British bounty and the fields went quiet. The plant that did that work was Indigofera tinctoria.
There is a small lie in the name. Sanguinea means blood, and yet the iris in front of you is blue, or blue running toward violet, with only a wine-dark deepening in the falls to argue the case. The botanists felt the strain too: Carl Thunberg first tried to file the plant as Iris orientalis in 1794, found that name already taken, and the species waited until 1813 for the one carried since. The Japanese never bothered with Latin. To them the flower is ayame, one of the three irises of early summer, threaded through a thousand years of poetry and arriving in that uncertain seam where the old poets could never quite agree whether spring had ended or summer begun.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, their name taken from the Greek word for willow, after leaves that recall a willow's. Itea chinensis is the Chinese sweetspire, an uncommon evergreen member of the group, a medium to tall shrub of neat, compact form with oval, glossy leaves that hold through the year in the warm South. In spring the plant hangs slender four-inch spikes of small white flowers, softly fragrant and busy with bees.
Jasminum officinale var. grandiflorum, the Spanish or Royal jasmine, is the large-flowered, intensely fragrant jasmine of perfume and tradition, a semi-evergreen twining vine that opens clusters of pure white, star-shaped flowers whose scent is among the most prized in the plant world. Larger-flowered and more tender than the common poet's jasmine, this is the plant behind jasmine absolute, the costly essence at the heart of classic perfumery.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–15 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
topical applications, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness
Jasminum x stephanense, the Stephan jasmine, is the rare pink-flowered hybrid of the group, a cross between the red jasmine, Jasminum beesianum, and the poet's jasmine, Jasminum officinale. The vigorous, semi-evergreen scrambling vine carries small, soft pink, fragrant flowers over slender stems clothed in fine pinnate leaves, combining the pink of one parent with the hardiness and perfume of the other.
By late summer, when many shrubs have said their piece, Lespedeza thunbergii 'Spring Grove' is only clearing its throat. The many woody, arching stems bend into a green fountain through the season, then bow lower still under a long, generous fall of rose-purple pea flowers carried in racemes six to eight inches long. 'Spring Grove' is a newer selection said to hold darker purple flowers and a tidier, better habit than the old standard 'Gibraltar', and the photographs here come courtesy of the JC Raulston Arboretum.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Sulphurea' is coral honeysuckle gone golden, a yellow-flowered form of the native trumpet honeysuckle that trades the usual scarlet for clear, soft sulphur-yellow. The tubular flowers cluster in tiered whorls at the branch tips from late spring through summer, glowing against fresh green leaves so the whole vine looks sunlit even under a gray sky.
In the dead of winter, when the garden asks for little and gives less, Lonicera × purpusii answers with perfume. This winter honeysuckle is a hybrid of two Chinese species, Lonicera fragrantissima and Lonicera standishii, and carries the best of both: small, creamy-white, tubular flowers that open along the bare stems from late winter into early spring, throwing a clean, lemon-sweet fragrance that carries yards on a mild day.
Magnolia virginiana, the sweetbay magnolia, has long been a tree of distinction in the American landscape, ranging from the cool wetlands of Massachusetts to the Gulf Coast. Across that span the species wears two very different guises. In the northern states the sweetbay is a smaller, often shrubby tree that drops its leaves in winter; in the Deep South the species reaches fullest expression as Magnolia virginiana var. australis, the evergreen southern sweetbay, a large and enduring tree of great grace.
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.
Myrcianthes fragrans is a member of the myrtle family native to the hammocks and coastal scrub of Florida and the Caribbean, the same botanical neighborhood as guava and allspice, which says something about the family character and the quality of the fragrance involved. Crush a leaf and the scent is immediate and specific: nutmeg with a citrus edge, clean and resinous in a way that makes the plant worth encountering even out of flower. The tiny, deep green leaves hold the aromatic oils responsible, and keep that quality year-round.
Black gum is one of the longest-lived hardwoods in eastern North America; individual trees have been aged past six hundred and fifty years, standing quietly in swamp margins and rocky uplands while everything human around them came and went. The names alone are a small history lesson. Nyssa was a water nymph of Greek myth, sylvatica means of the woods, so the botanical name reads as water nymph of the forest; tupelo comes from the Creek ito and opilwa, tree and swamp; and the old northern name pepperidge is the one a Connecticut baker borrowed for her farm and her bread company. Curiously, no part of the tree is gummy at all. What black gum does own is the autumn. They are among the first trees to turn and among the fiercest, the glossy summer leaves igniting into scarlet, orange, and deep wine-purple weeks before the rest of the woods has given the season a thought, an early flare that signals birds to the ripening blue fruit. The wood is so cross-grained it is nearly impossible to split, which sent it into tool handles, chopping bowls, and, where trunks went hollow with age, into bee gums, the log hives that made gum a synonym for beehive across Appalachia. Black gum is notoriously hard to move at any size, which is exactly why you so rarely see a big one for sale, and exactly why you should start one small, now, and let them outlive you.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
30–40 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support, reproductive health
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.
A true olive for the shade, Olea yunnanensis is the sort of plant that rewards the gardener who reads labels twice. The genus is the olive genus, kin to the ancient Mediterranean fruit tree and to the sweet olives and privets of the same family, yet this species hails from the mountains of Yunnan in southwestern China rather than the sun-baked hills of the Old World. The narrow, leathery, dark green leaves carry an unmistakable Osmanthus cast, glossy above and paler beneath, and build into a dense, rounded evergreen canopy that holds the year.
Penstemon digitalis is one of the most adaptable of the native beardtongues, a clump-forming perennial of moist meadows, prairies, and open woods across the eastern and central United States. 'Husker Red', selected at the University of Nebraska and named Perennial Plant of the Year in 1996, keeps all the toughness of the wild species but wears it in deep wine-red: a basal rosette of glossy maroon foliage that holds color from spring through fall.
Phlox carolina 'Kim' is among the best of the Carolina phloxes, a selection found by the plantswoman Jan Midgley in Alabama and grown ever since for good health and honest flower power. From a low, tidy clump of narrow, almost lime-green leaves rise sturdy stems eighteen to twenty-four inches tall, each carrying an open, airy cluster of pale to bright pink flowers, five petals apiece, hovering just above the foliage from late spring into early summer. Where the border phloxes so often finish the season spotted and tired, 'Kim' holds clean, fresh foliage from spring straight through fall.
Physostegia correllii, Correll's obedient plant, is a rare and handsome member of the mint family, a robust, upright, somewhat succulent perennial rising from thick, spreading rhizomes. Among the false dragonheads the species stands out for unusually dark, glossy green leaves and cool purplish-pink flowers streaked and spotted with darker purple, an inch long and packed into dense terminal spikes.
In Japan they call the shrub tobira, short for tobira no ki, the door tree, because the cut branches were hung in the doorway at Setsubun to turn back demons at the threshold of spring. The broken wood smells rank, which was rather the point: bad spirits, like most of us, would rather not walk through a bad smell. The genus name is kinder and more exact, pitta and sporos, pitch and seed, for the resin that coats the black seeds and glues them to whatever bird carries them off.
