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.
This very rare aster, now placed in the genus Eurybia, is a true Florida endemic, native only to the moist pine flatwoods of the lower Apalachicola River. The plant is a botanical oddity: the clumping, foot-tall foliage is narrow, stiff, and grass-like, so unlike the leafy stems of an ordinary aster that a passerby might take the clump for a tuft of sedge. From late spring into early summer, slender flower stems rise above the leaves carrying clusters of inch-wide lavender-purple daisies, each ringing a small yellow eye.
The limequat was born of catastrophe. After the twin freezes of 1894 and 1895 laid waste to Florida's groves, Walter T. Swingle of the United States Department of Agriculture set out to breed citrus that could shrug off a cold snap, and in 1909 he crossed the sharp little West Indian or Key lime (Citrus aurantifolia) with the round Marumi kumquat (Fortunella japonica). Named and introduced in 1913 alongside a sister seedling called Lakeland, the Eustis limequat stands among the first successful intergeneric citrus hybrids, living proof that two separate genera could be wedded and still bear generous fruit.
Few fruits carry the weight of centuries quite like the common fig. Ficus carica, native to the sun-soaked hills of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, has graced gardens and tables since biblical times, and no member of the tribe is more beloved in the American South than 'Celeste', the little fig so sweet that growers have long called the tree the Sugar Fig.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
8–15 ft.
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
We are identifying this little-known fig as Ficus heterophylla thanks to Tony Avent of Plant Delights, who was most likely the source of the cuttings we originally started with. The species name means different leaves, and the plant lives up to the promise: juvenile foliage may be lobed and wandering in outline, while the mature leaves settle into dark green, pointed, slightly heart-shaped blades carried on handsome red petioles. A faint sweetness hangs about the shrub, and the long, almost vine-like branches lend the whole plant a loose, scrambling grace.
The Latin gives away the joke before you have even seen the plant. Ficus vaccinioides, the Formosan creeping fig, is a fig that has decided to impersonate a blueberry: vaccinioides means resembling Vaccinium, and the small, glossy, obovate leaves running close along reddish stems really could pass for an evergreen huckleberry. They are no relation at all. They are a true fig, latex and all, just one that has shrunk to a few inches tall and given up any ambition of climbing.
The gardenia needs no introduction in the South; the scent alone has been stopping people in driveways for generations. What 'Chuck Hayes' adds to that old story is nerve in the cold. The line traces back to the late 1970s and a Virginia Beach nurseryman named Charlie Hayes, who noticed a single-flowered gardenia that had come through a brutal freeze unbothered. He crossed that survivor with a double-flowered plant and handed the seedlings to Dan Milbocker, a horticulturist at the Hampton Roads research station, who grew them out, picked the toughest, and eventually released the plant under Hayes's name. The result is a fully double, classically fragrant gardenia that behaves as a far more delicate shrub has no right to.
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
Few flowers announce themselves the way white ginger lily does after dark. Through late summer and early fall, the tall leafy stems open dense terminal spikes of pure white flowers, each bloom shaped like a hovering butterfly with a small yellow-green stain at the throat, and each one throwing a rich, sweet perfume that carries across a warm garden in the evening air. The scent is jasmine-deep and unmistakable, the reason the flowers are gathered for perfume and personal adornment across the tropics.
Heimia salicifolia is an airy, fine-textured shrub that carries a surprising amount of history in a modest frame. Slender willow-like leaves clothe the arching stems, and from midsummer into fall small, bright yellow, five-petaled flowers open in the leaf axils all along the branches, each followed by a little dry seed capsule. The overall effect is light and gauzy, a soft yellow haze rather than a bold splash, and the plant grows fast and multi-branched into a rounded, four-to-eight-foot mound.
Hibiscus dasycalyx is one of the rarest wildflowers in the country, described only in 1968, and even then from a mere handful of sites in the bottomlands of east Texas, in Houston, Trinity, and Cherokee counties, along the Neches, Angelina, and Trinity rivers. The total wild population has been estimated in the low thousands. Whole seasons of botanical fieldwork across the Southeast have turned up fewer plants than a single good nursery bed.
From the warm lower slopes of the Himalayas, where they scramble through scrub from India and Nepal on into Bhutan, comes one of the more theatrical shrubs you can grow. The genus carries the name of Johan Theodor Holmskiold, an eighteenth-century Danish botanist, while sanguinea nods at the blood-red flush the flowers take on with age. For years they sat in Verbenaceae. Botanists have since moved them into Lamiaceae, the mint family, which makes them distant kin to salvia, rosemary, and teak. You would never guess as much to look at them.
'Preziosa' is a small, jewel-like hydrangea with a tangled pedigree and an unusual gift. Raised in Germany from the nursery tradition of Georg Arends and introduced around 1961, the shrub is a hybrid of Hydrangea serrata and Hydrangea macrophylla, and catalogs list the plant under all three names depending on which parent they favor. Whatever the label, 'Preziosa' behaves like a compact mophead, three to four feet high and wide, built for a smaller garden.
Hypericum nudiflorum is the early riser among the St. John's Worts, a slender, upright shrub that opens golden flowers as early as May, often a full month ahead of relatives. The blooms carry the many-stamened brush typical of the clan, set against broad, light green, oval leaves that give the plant a softer, leafier look than the needle-leaved species.
Ilex glabra 'Leucocarpa' is the white-berried surprise among the inkberries, a native evergreen holly that trades the usual near-black fruit for berries of clean ivory white. On the ordinary inkberry the dark berries all but vanish against the deep green leaves, but here the pale fruit stands out cleanly and holds on the branches from fall right through to spring, a quiet, unexpected show in the winter garden.
Ilex paraguariensis is the holly behind maté, the caffeine-rich tea poured from a gourd and sipped through a metal straw across Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and southern Brazil. As a plant, yerba maté is a broadleaf evergreen holly, a shrub or small tree with dark, leathery, serrated leaves, closely resembling the native dahoon holly, Ilex cassine, of the southeastern United States, and carrying the same small white flowers and, on female plants, small red berries.
Ilex 'Apollo' has one job in the garden, and does it superbly: pollination. A vigorous hybrid deciduous holly from the U.S. National Arboretum, crossing the Japanese winterberry, Ilex serrata, with the native American winterberry, Ilex verticillata, 'Apollo' was bred and released specifically as the male partner for the celebrated female 'Sparkleberry', and stands in equally well for 'Winter Red'.
Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite' is winterberry shrunk to garden size and cranked up in intensity. Where much of the landscape fades to gray, this compact native holly turns into a beacon, the bare stems packed with heavy clusters of large, glossy scarlet berries that color in fall and cling deep into winter, a living ember at the pond's edge or against fresh snow.
Every winterberry covered in red is hiding a secret, and his name is 'Southern Gentleman'. Winterberry hollies are dioecious, male and female on separate plants, and only the pollinated females set the blazing red fruit the species is grown for. No male nearby, no berries. 'Southern Gentleman' is the male who makes the show possible, and asks for none of the credit.
Ilex 'Sparkleberry' is the aristocrat of the winterberries, a vigorous hybrid holly bred from the native winterberry, Ilex verticillata, and the Japanese winterberry, Ilex serrata, and introduced by the U.S. National Arboretum. The cross brought hybrid vigor and a heavier, longer-holding crop: tall, upright stems that shed their leaves in fall and blaze with bright red fruit, persisting so well that the berries often hang on into spring.
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
