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.
There are few sights more stirring than a wisteria in bloom, and 'Amethyst Falls' offers all the romance without the unruly habits of the Asian cousins. This refined selection of the native American wisteria, Wisteria frutescens, pours out cascades of fragrant, lavender-violet blossoms in late spring, with smaller flushes through summer, a soft echo of springtime returning again and again.
For the first sixty-five years in the books, this vine was filed as a kind of soybean. Linnaeus named the plant Glycine frutescens in 1753, frutescens meaning turning shrubby, and there the classification sat until 1818, when Thomas Nuttall looked again, decided a woody climber of the southern riverbanks deserved a genus apart, and named the vine for his friend Caspar Wistar, the Philadelphia anatomist. Somewhere between the man and the plant a vowel slipped, Wistar becoming Wisteria, and the misspelling has outlived everyone involved.
Some years ago the late Lynn Lowery, a pioneer of Texas native plants, found a fine selection of native wisteria near the dam of an East Texas reservoir. The dam was known as Dam-B, and Lynn gave that name to the plant, though some contend the true name was Damn Bee. Woodlanders thanks Dr. David Creech of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, for the start of this and several other fine plants.
A rare white form of the well-behaved native. Wisteria frutescens var. nivea is a twining, woody, deciduous vine with compound leaves and short clusters of pure white flowers that open with the foliage, far less rampant than the common Asian wisterias and, in white, a genuine rarity. This form was virtually unknown to American gardeners until Woodlanders brought the plant into the trade.
The white form of the latest-blooming native. Wisteria macrostachya 'Clara Mack' is a twining, deciduous Kentucky wisteria with compound leaves and long, hanging clusters of pure white flowers, a splendid white version of a species normally blue. The racemes run longer and open later than those of the other native, Wisteria frutescens, extending the native wisteria season.
A charming citrus hybrid for containers, winter patios, and kitchen harvests. Known as the calamondin orange, x Citrofortunella mitis 'Calamondin' is a compact, cold-tolerant citrus treasured for abundant fragrant blossoms, ornamental good looks, and tart, edible fruit. A natural cross between the mandarin orange, Citrus reticulata, and the kumquat, Fortunella, calamondin is equally at home on a patio or in a bright kitchen window, offering both beauty and bounty the year round.
A brand-new intergeneric hybrid, and a small horticultural triumph. Dr. Tom Ranney of the North Carolina State University research station in Fletcher succeeded in crossing two icons of the Southern flora: the legendary Franklinia alatamaha, the lost Franklin tree that has not been seen in the wild since the early 1800s, with the native loblolly bay, Gordonia lasianthus. The result is xGordlinia grandiflora, a bigeneric cross that carries the best of both parents.
A fine-textured native yucca from the Texas hill country. Yucca constricta, the Buckley yucca, forms a stemless or short-stemmed rosette, single or clustered, of many very narrow, blue-green, spine-tipped leaves edged with curling white marginal filaments. The species honors the nineteenth-century naturalist Samuel Botsford Buckley, and the epithet constricta notes the narrowed leaves that give the plant a softer, more delicate look than the bolder yuccas.
Yuzu Ichandrin is not a lemon. This is something older and considerably more interesting, a naturally occurring hybrid between Ichang papeda, Citrus ichangensis, and Satsuma mandarin, long cultivated across the high-elevation citrus regions of China and Japan, and among the most cold-hardy citrus in existence. Where standard yuzu, Citrus junos, and true lemons would surrender to a Southern winter, Ichandrin holds. Mature, established trees have come through ten degrees Fahrenheit with nothing worse than tip dieback. This is, by any honest measure, the citrus a zone 7 or 8 gardener actually gets to keep.
A native tree that bites back, and can numb a toothache. Zanthoxylum clava-herculis, the toothache tree or Hercules' club, is a small to medium deciduous tree of the citrus family, native along the coastal Southeast from Virginia to Florida and Texas. The genus name Zanthoxylum means yellow wood, and the species clava-herculis, the club of Hercules, names the stout, spiny, club-shaped trunk that is the tree's signature.
One of the finest shade trees for a hard place. Zelkova serrata, the Japanese zelkova, is a deciduous tree of the elm family, native to Japan, Korea, and eastern China, long valued as the sacred keyaki of Japanese temples and a prized timber and bonsai subject. In the West the tree has become a leading street and lawn tree, in no small part as a graceful, disease-resistant stand-in for the American elms lost to Dutch elm disease.
A rare gem of the Southeastern coastal plain, chosen for the bluest foliage of the tribe. Zenobia pulverulenta 'Woodlanders Blue' is a semi-evergreen shrub of the heath family, native to the pocosins and pine savannas of the coastal Carolinas, and grown above all for striking powder-blue, glaucous foliage and hanging clusters of white, bell-shaped flowers in early summer. Woodlanders selected and introduced this exceptionally blue form, which has since won wider recognition.
A native lily that answers the rain. Zephyranthes atamasco, the atamasco lily or rain lily, is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to moist woods and meadows of the Southeastern United States. The name atamasco comes from the Powhatan people of the Virginia tidewater, an old word carried into botany, and the plant has also long been called Easter lily for the season of bloom.
A rain lily that flowers on a whim of the weather. Zephyranthes fosteri, Foster's pink rain lily, is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to Mexico and hardy in the warm South, grown for vivid, crocus-like pink flowers that appear as if overnight after summer and autumn rains.
