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.
The Lakeland limequat is a citrus lover's answer to cold: a compact, productive hybrid that pairs the hardiness of the kumquat with the bright, tropical punch of Key lime. One of three limequats bred by W. T. Swingle of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Florida in 1909 and named for the town of Lakeland, this cross (Citrus x floridana) joins the West Indian, or Key, lime with the round Marumi kumquat (Fortunella japonica). The result carries intense citrus flavor on a plant that thrives well beyond the usual citrus belt.
Few tender shrubs work as hard for as long as the lantanas, and Lantana camara 'Hybrida' distills the whole genus down to a single clear note of yellow. The species belongs to the verbena family, Verbenaceae, and hails from the West Indies and the warm reaches of Mexico south through tropical America, where the plant scrambles along roadsides and clearings in a haze of nectar and butterflies. The genus name is a borrowed one: Renaissance botanists lifted 'Lantana' from an old Latin name for the wayfaring tree, Viburnum lantana, whose domed flower clusters the lantana blooms happen to echo. The epithet camara is murkier, glossed variously as a vaulted chamber or a small boat, the true meaning long since lost to the record.
Every so often a plant arrives not from a breeder's bench but from a neighbor's yard, and Lantana camara 'Miss Huff' is one of those happy accidents. The selection was found in cultivation near Athens, Georgia, in the garden of the Miss Huff for whom the plant is named, and introduced to the trade by the former Goodness Grows Nursery. What set this lantana apart was cold tolerance: where most of the tribe sulk and die at the first hard freeze, 'Miss Huff' has proven the hardiest lantana in commerce, with well-established clumps shrugging off brief dips to a few degrees below zero and returning faithfully from the root even in zone 7.
Where the shrubby lantanas stand up, Lantana montevidensis lies down and travels. This is the trailing lantana, a low, weeping member of the verbena family, Verbenaceae, native to the warm grasslands of southern South America, from southern Brazil across Uruguay and Paraguay into Argentina. The species carries a place name in the epithet: montevidensis means of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital near which the plant was first gathered and described, so the botanical name is really a small geography lesson tucked into Latin.
No plant carries a heavier freight of story than Laurus nobilis, the bay laurel of the Mediterranean and the original laurel of the victor's crown. The genus name is simply the classical Latin for the tree, and the epithet nobilis means noble or renowned, a fair description of a plant whose leaves once crowned poets, athletes, and returning generals. The whole vocabulary of achievement still leans on this tree: a baccalaureate, a poet laureate, and the warning not to rest on one's laurels all trace back to the wreath of bay. In Greek myth the laurel was born of unrequited love, when the nymph Daphne, fleeing Apollo, was changed into a laurel tree by her father the river god; ever after the god wore the leaves in her memory, and the tree became sacred to him.
There are plants that offer fragrance, and then there are plants that conjure memory. Lavandula dentata, with silvery, sawtoothed leaves and near ever-blooming lavender plumes, belongs firmly to the second kind, a bearer of the sort of scent that lingers in a sun-warmed linen chest or in the folds of a well-worn book left on a porch rail.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, topical applications, respiratory support, digestive health
Lavandula × intermedia is the lavender that finally makes sense of the Southeast. A natural and cultivated cross between English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) and spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia), the plant is known in Provence as lavandin, and there the sterile, vigorous hybrid has long been the mainstay of the perfume fields, prized for a heavier yield of fragrant oil than either parent alone. The name records that middle ground: intermedia, intermediate, a lavender poised between the sweet refinement of the English kind and the camphorous punch of the spike.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, topical applications, respiratory support
Few late-summer plants command a border like Leonotis leonurus, the lion's ear of the South African veld. Tall square stems, the signature of the mint family, Lamiaceae, rise five feet and more before breaking into tier upon tier of burnt-orange flowers, each whorl circling the stem like a ruff. The velvety, curved tubes are the source of both common names, lion's ear and lion's tail, and the botany agrees: Leonotis comes from the Greek for lion's ear, and leonurus for lion's tail.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
2–4 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, topical applications, general wellness
Liatris spicata, the blazing star or gayfeather, sends up rockets of feathery purple in the heart of summer, one of the great vertical accents of the North American prairie. The species is native to the moist meadows, prairies, and wet savannas of eastern North America, where the flower spikes once rose in their thousands among the tall grasses. Set against those horizontal sweeps of grass, the erect, bottlebrush spikes give any planting a jolt of structure and color.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
immune support, respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, digestive health
Ligustrum quihoui, the waxyleaf or Quihou privet, saves the family's best trick for last. Where most privets flower in late spring, this species from northern and central China waits until late summer and even early autumn, then covers itself in long, airy panicles of small creamy-white flowers, sweetly and unmistakably fragrant. In a season when the flowering shrubs are mostly finished, that late show is worth a good deal.
An evergreen spicebush is a rare thing, and Lindera akoensis is one of the best. Woodlanders grew this shrub from cuttings taken in the garden of Bobby Green of Green's Nursery in Fairhope, Alabama, shared simply as an evergreen Lindera from Taiwan. The plant matches the botanical description of Lindera akoensis, a species of low mountain woodland in Taiwan, and has proven a handsome, glossy-leaved evergreen for the southern garden.
A broadleaf evergreen with a story, this variegated tanbark oak came into the country from Japan through the late Dr. Fred Meyer of the United States National Arboretum, a botanist and tireless plant explorer, and was almost certainly first offered to American gardeners by Woodlanders. The draw is the foliage: dense, leathery, glossy leaves, each dark green blade split by an irregular central streak of gold and cream, so that a whole tree seems lit from within. Plant Delights later distributed the same selection under the name 'Starburst,' and both names point to this one bright-leaved plant.
Lithocarpus henryi, the Henry tanoak, is an evergreen cousin of the oaks that few gardeners have met. Native to the mountain forests of central China, the tree carries long, narrow, pointed leaves of glossy deep green and builds, in time, a dense, rounded evergreen crown of fifteen to twenty-five feet. Among a genus of mostly tender species, this one ranks as the hardiest, which is what makes the Henry tanoak worth seeking out for milder temperate gardens.
Few native perennials burn as bright as Lobelia cardinalis, the cardinal flower, whose late-summer spikes of pure, velvety scarlet stop traffic in any garden. The species ranges across much of North America along stream banks, wet meadows, and ditches, and takes the common name from the vivid red of a cardinal's robes. From a low rosette of broad green leaves rises a stiff, unbranched stem hung with tubular flowers built, as luck would have it, precisely to the reach of a hummingbird's bill.
Where the cardinal flower runs to scarlet, Lobelia siphilitica answers in blue. The great blue lobelia sends up leafy spikes packed with inch-long, two-lipped flowers of clear, saturated blue in late summer and early fall, one of the truest blues in the native flora and a gift to the garden at a tired time of year. The species grows wild across eastern and central North America in moist meadows, low woods, and along streamsides.
Lomatia myricoides is an Australian rarity that has quietly proven itself in the American Southeast, and that combination is the whole appeal. A member of the Proteaceae, the great Southern Hemisphere family of banksias, grevilleas, and the waratah, this evergreen shrub spreads wide and low, clothed in long, narrow, sharply toothed leaves, and carries sprays of creamy-white, spidery flowers in the heat of midsummer, sweetly fragrant at close range.
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.
Coral honeysuckle in a suit of gold: Lonicera sempervirens 'John Clayton' trades the fire-engine red of the species for clear, warm yellow, borne in the same neat whorled clusters at the branch tips. This is a compact, well-mannered, repeat-blooming selection of one of the finest native vines of the eastern United States, flowering from late spring through summer and often again in fall.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Leo' is the coral honeysuckle at its free-flowering best, a selection of the native red honeysuckle that covers itself in bright red, yellow-throated trumpets over an unusually long season. The tubular flowers pour nectar for ruby-throated hummingbirds, which find the vine as irresistible as gardeners do, and the blue-green leaves, some fused right around the stem, make a cool foil for all that heat.
For a vine that earns a place on the fence, few honeysuckles match Lonicera × heckrottii 'Goldflame'. This is a hybrid grown for two gifts at once: bold color and a sweet, faintly citrus fragrance that hangs in the air on warm evenings. The trumpet flowers open in a blend of deep rose-pink and golden orange, like a watercolor sunset, and keep coming from late spring through early fall.
