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.
Polyspora axillaris, the fried egg tree, is a glossy, small evergreen tree or large shrub of the tea family, Theaceae, native to southern China, Taiwan, and Vietnam and still rarely cultivated in the United States. A close relative of the native loblolly bay (Gordonia lasianthus), the plant bears abundant, showy white flowers three inches across.
The procimequat is a rare and fascinating citrus hybrid, born from a botanical marriage of the Eustis limequat (itself a cross of kumquat and lime) and the Hong Kong kumquat (Fortunella hindsii). The result is a precocious, compact plant that combines the zesty lime tang of the limequat parent with the tiny, ornamental charm of the wild kumquats, all on a frame small enough for a patio pot.
Before European settlement reshaped the eastern landscape, Prunus americana was a fixture at the forest edge: thicket-forming, thorny, and extravagantly beautiful in early spring when the plum covered itself in white flowers before the leaves had even stirred. The Lakota knew the plum as kañta, the Cherokee as gunasdv, and across dozens of nations from the Great Plains to the Appalachians the tree was considered a plant of genuine importance. The fruits were eaten fresh, dried into cakes, and worked into pemmican, the dense, calorie-rich mixture of dried meat, fat, and fruit that sustained people through long winters and longer journeys. The inner bark was used medicinally, and the dense, close-grained wood was worked into tools. This was not an ornamental plant in the minds of the people who knew it first. The plum was a resource, in the fullest sense.
A native plum with a longer human history than any other fruit in North America. Prunus angustifolia, the Chickasaw plum, also called Cherokee plum, sand plum, sandhill plum, or Florida sand plum depending on the part of the range you are standing in, was actively cultivated by Indigenous peoples across the southeastern and central United States long before European contact. The Chickasaw, Cherokee, and several other nations carried the species in their orchards and food gardens, dried the fruit for winter storage, and almost certainly moved the plant eastward through pre-Columbian trade networks from what botanists now believe to be the species' true origin further west. The species was so deeply associated with Indigenous cultivation by the time European naturalists arrived that the binomial angustifolia, narrow leaf, eventually displaced earlier names like P. chicasa in formal taxonomy, though the common names kept the tribal attribution. Kansas made the plant its official state fruit in 2022. Few American native fruits carry their human history this visibly.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–10 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, respiratory support
Prunus caroliniana, the Carolina cherry laurel, is a fast, dense broadleaf evergreen native to the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, from North Carolina to Texas. The glossy, deep green, finely toothed leaves and tight, upright habit make the tree one of the South's most useful evergreen screens, and the crushed foliage carries the sharp almond, maraschino-cherry scent that marks the genus.
'Kojo no mai' is a small cherry with a large personality, a dwarf Fuji cherry grown as much for the winter silhouette as for the spring flowers. The stiff, twiggy branches grow in sharp zig-zags, crooking this way and that into a dense, architectural little bush, and in early spring, before the leaves, those bare zig-zag stems line themselves with single flowers, pink in bud and opening to white and blush. The Japanese name translates, fittingly, as flight of butterflies.
Prunus japonica, the Japanese bush cherry or Japanese almond-cherry, is a compact deciduous shrub grown for an early flood of delicate pink-to-white bloom. Wiry branches carry dense clusters of five-petaled flowers just as the leaves appear, wrapping the low, rounded frame in soft color in early to mid spring.
Portugal laurel is the evergreen that quiet, well-run gardens lean on, a dense, glossy, dark-leaved shrub that Hillier's manual once flatly called indispensable. The oval leaves are a deep lustrous green, carried on wine-red petioles and reddish young stems that give the whole plant a warm undertone, and in early summer slender racemes of small, fragrant, creamy-white flowers stand out against the dark foliage before ripening to little cherries that pass from red to near-black.
Prunus mume, the Japanese flowering apricot, is one of the most beloved of all winter-flowering trees, opening almond-scented blossoms in the depths of winter, from soft white to deep pink, on bare branches while the rest of the garden sleeps. In China and Japan the mei or ume has been celebrated in poetry and painting for well over a thousand years as a symbol of resilience and the turning of the year.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
18–25 ft.
Spread
12–18 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, general wellness
Prunus mume 'Peggy Clarke' is a selection of the Japanese flowering apricot, a medium-sized deciduous tree grown above all for showy, deeply fragrant blossoms that open in the depths of winter when few other trees are in flower. 'Peggy Clarke' bears rich rose-pink, double, cup-shaped flowers, ruffled and fragrant, crowded along the bare branches in late winter and early spring.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
12–15 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, general wellness
Prunus umbellata, the flatwoods plum, is a picturesque small deciduous tree native to well-drained soils across the southeastern United States. Where the Chickasaw plum forms suckering thickets, the flatwoods plum grows as a single, gnarled, small tree with rough, dark bark and a wide, open crown, an old-field and fence-row character that reads as quietly beautiful in age.
Chinese quince is one of those trees that seems to offer something beautiful at every turn. Soft pink flowers arrive in spring, dark green leaves carry the tree through summer, and fall brings warm color along with large, fragrant fruit. Even in winter the peeling bark gives a quiet kind of beauty.
Pseudolarix kaempferi, better known by the synonym Pseudolarix amabilis and the common name golden larch, is a rare, slow-growing deciduous conifer native to eastern China. Despite the name, the golden larch is not a true larch but the sole member of its own genus, Pseudolarix, prized for a graceful broad-pyramidal form, soft texture, and a brilliant golden fall color that rivals any maple or ginkgo.
Ptelea trifoliata, the hop tree or wafer ash, is a unique and underappreciated native, a small, bushy deciduous tree of eastern and central North America. Highly adaptable, the plant takes dry, rocky ground as readily as moist, well-drained sites, which makes the hop tree a fine choice for naturalized landscapes, pollinator gardens, and woodland edges.
Punica granatum 'California Sunset' turns the pomegranate into something closer to a florist's confection. The flowers arrive fully double, coral to salmon-red and streaked with creamy white, each one fluted and ruffled like an old boutonniere carnation rather than the tidy scarlet trumpet of the wild species. Because the petals are packed so tightly, the flowers rarely set fruit, which is precisely the point: this is a pomegranate grown for the long parade of bloom from early summer into fall, not for the leathery globes at the end of the season.
There are pomegranates grown for fruit, and pomegranates grown for flowers, and then there is 'Eight Ball', grown for sheer astonishment. Where the species bears globes the color of garnets, Punica granatum 'Eight Ball' ripens fruit so dark, round, and dusky that the pomegranates look dipped in coal, closer to the ball the cultivar is named for than to anything in the produce aisle. The color runs bone-deep: the fruit is so loaded with anthocyanin pigment that even the cambium beneath the bark shows purple.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–10 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, heart support, general wellness, topical applications
Punica granatum 'Toyosho' answers a question few think to ask of a pomegranate: what if the flower, not the fruit, were the whole point? The blooms are fully double and carnation-like, as much as three inches across, in warm shades of peach, apricot, and soft salmon, with the crimped, tissue-paper texture of an old-fashioned boutonniere. So many petals crowd each flower that pollination becomes nearly impossible, so 'Toyosho' seldom fruits, spending the long summer instead in an unhurried procession of bloom.
This is the pomegranate grown the old way, for the fruit. Punica granatum is a deciduous Middle Eastern shrub of narrow, glossy leaves and vivid orange-red flowers, followed by the large, leathery-skinned, garnet-seeded fruits for which the plant has been cultivated since antiquity. Woodlanders raised this particular selection from seed of a good fruiting specimen in upstate South Carolina, and the plant may well represent 'Wonderful', the widely grown commercial variety, proven here as a dependable cropper in the southern garden.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, heart support, general wellness, topical applications
Pyracomeles vilmorinii is the sort of plant collectors trade knowing looks over, a small, fine-textured evergreen so uncommon that most gardeners have never met one. The little leaves are cut into narrow, fern-like divisions along arching, thornless branches, and in spring flat clusters of small white flowers give way by autumn to a scatter of coral-red fruits. The overall effect is airy and delicate, unusual in an evergreen shrub.
Quercus acerifolia is one of the rarest oaks in North America, and one of the most quietly beautiful. The name says the first thing you notice: acerifolia means maple-leaved, and the upper leaves really do look like a sugar maple's, often as wide as they are long, cut into three to five sharp, glossy lobes that turn deep red and burgundy in fall. A close relative of the Shumard oak, maple-leaf oak grows as anything from a stunted, multi-trunked shrub on a windswept ridge to a single-trunked tree of forty or fifty feet in cultivation.
