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.
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.
Osmanthus armatus, a rare gem from the evergreen forests of western China, brings both elegance and resilience to the garden. This large, multi-branched shrub is known for thick, lustrous, dark green leaves adorned with prominent marginal and terminal spines, reminiscent of holly.
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.
Almost everything about Pinus glabra argues against their being a pine at all. The bark is smooth and gray, close-grained, so like the bark of an oak or hickory that people walk straight past a mature one without taking the tree for a conifer; it is the single most reliable way to know the tree. The needles are soft, short, and paired, a cool dark green, worn in a dense rounded crown rather than the open candelabra of their relatives. And most usefully, they tolerate shade. Where nearly every other southern pine demands full sun and open, burned ground, spruce pine settles happily into the wooded margins just above the bottomlands, growing in the understory beneath oaks, beech, and magnolia. They were named by Thomas Walter, the English-born botanist of the Santee whose Flora Caroliniana appeared in London in 1788, the year before he died; the epithet glabra, meaning smooth and hairless, marks those glabrous young twigs. Even the timber keeps its own counsel, drying at so different a rate from other southern pines that mills cannot season it in the same batch. This is a pine for the places pines aren't supposed to go: the shaded corner, the woodland edge, the spot where you wanted evergreen structure and assumed you couldn't have it. Once you can recognize one, you start wanting them everywhere the light runs thin.
Before the South was farms and pavement it was, in great part, longleaf: an open, sunlit forest of widely spaced pines over a ground layer so rich a single square yard could hold dozens of species, the whole thing held together by fire. They ran across tens of millions of acres of the coastal plain, by some counts as many as ninety million, from Virginia to east Texas, and almost all of it is gone now, which is the quiet grief behind every longleaf you meet. They gave the South tar, pitch, and turpentine, the naval stores that caulked the wooden fleets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and earned North Carolinians the nickname tar heels. Pinus palustris is the patient one. A seedling spends years as a dense green tussock, looking for all the world like a clump of grass and fooling everyone who doesn't know better, while underground they drive a deep taproot and wait out the fires that clear their rivals. Then they bolt, throwing up a single thick candle of a stem before they bother with branches. The needles are the longest of any eastern pine, well past a foot, hanging in soft fountains and catching wind like nothing else in the genus. Give one sun and room and you are planting the architecture the gopher tortoise and the red-cockaded woodpecker were waiting for. They ask only for patience, and they reward it for three hundred years.
Pistacia chinensis, the Chinese pistache, is a medium-sized deciduous tree and a close relative of the pistachio nut, though this species carries no crop for the table. What the tree offers instead is one of the finest autumn shows in the warm South: lustrous, dark green compound leaves that ignite, nearly all at once, into a fire of scarlet, orange, and red before they fall.
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.
A refined and rarely offered evergreen from New Zealand, Podocarpus acutifolius forms a dense, finely textured silhouette of short, sharp-tipped leaves that give the plant a crisp, architectural presence. Heat-tolerant and well suited to the southern United States when properly sited, this uncommon conifer offers structure, restraint, and year-round depth in the landscape.
Podranea ricasoliana, the pink trumpet vine or Port St. John's creeper, is a fast-growing evergreen climber from the warm regions of South Africa, a member of the trumpet-creeper family, Bignoniaceae, prized for showy, trumpet-shaped flowers.
Polygala x dalmaisiana, the sweet pea shrub, is a fast-growing evergreen hybrid of two South African species (P. oppositifolia and P. myrtifolia), grown for a nearly year-round show of orchid-like flowers on an open, informal frame.
The English laurel is a large broadleaf evergreen shrub grown for bold, glossy foliage, spires of small white flowers, and, at times, small cherry-like red-to-black fruits. The species is variable, with a number of cultivated forms, and the plant is native to eastern Europe and Asia Minor.
Where blunt mountain mint is all broad silver, Pycnanthemum tenuifolium is the slender cousin, a fine-textured native built from wiry stems and narrow, almost needle-thin leaves. From midsummer into early fall the plant clouds over with flat-topped clusters of tiny white to pale lavender flowers, faintly purple-speckled, and the effect at a distance is a low haze of bloom. What the flowers lack in size they make up in draw: bees, small butterflies, wasps, and beneficial insects work the nectar in numbers that make narrowleaf mountain mint one of the most valuable pollinator plants of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, topical applications
Quercus alba, the white oak, is the grandfather of the eastern forest, a slow, massive, long-lived tree that can stand for centuries and outlast the people who plant them. The most famous of all was the Wye Oak of Wye Mills, Maryland, a single white oak that stood for more than four hundred and sixty years and served as Maryland's state tree until a storm brought the giant down in 2002. The broad, rounded crown, the pale, scaly, ash-gray bark, and the deeply lobed, blue-green leaves are the picture most people carry of an oak.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
50–80 ft.
Spread
50–80 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
The name is a promise the tree keeps only at the very end of the year. Coccinea is Latin for scarlet, and scarlet oak earns it in late October, well after the other oaks have turned and dropped, when the whole crown ignites into a clean, carrying red that holds for weeks and can be seen across a valley. On a good tree in the right soil, this is the best fall color the genus offers, which is saying something.
The overcup oak is named for a small piece of botanical theater: an acorn so nearly swallowed by its cup that only the tip shows, sealed up as if against the floodwaters the tree was born to. Quercus lyrata is a creature of the southern bottomlands, the broad floodplains and backswamps from the Mississippi Delta to the Carolina river bottoms, standing through the cycles of flood and drawdown that drown lesser trees.
Quercus michauxii is a big, generous bottomland oak that borrows the best of two better-known relatives: the pale, flaky, handsome bark of the white oak, and the large, coarsely toothed, chestnut-shaped leaves of the chestnut oak. The result is one of the noblest of the Southern hardwoods. In Coker and Totten's Trees of the Southeastern States, a 1931 letter from James Henry Rice, Jr. of Colleton County, South Carolina, put it plainly: "It is a noble and beautiful tree and might be termed majestic with no violence to the language."
The first surprise of Quercus phellos is that nobody believes they're an oak. The leaves are narrow and untoothed, willow-like, finer than an oak has any right to be, and they turn soft yellow before they fall; only the acorns, small and round and produced by the thousand, give the game away.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
