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.
Two things the common names get wrong: it is not Chinese, and it is not a maple. Abutilon pictum comes from the warm river country of southern Brazil and its neighbors, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the maple lives only in the leaves, which are lobed and toothed enough to have fooled people into "flowering maple." It belongs instead to the mallow family, in good company with hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and it carries that resemblance in every five-petaled bloom.
Call it a flowering maple if you like, but there is not a drop of maple in it. Abutilon pictum belongs to the mallow family, alongside hibiscus, hollyhock, okra, and cotton, and only the lobed, maple-shaped leaves account for the nickname. What the leaves of 'Souvenir de Bonn' actually do is carry a wide, irregular margin of cream around their green, a variegation bold enough to earn the plant its place on looks alone. The flowers settle the matter. All season they dangle from the branches like small paper lanterns, apricot to salmon, each bell veined through with crimson, swinging on thin stalks where the hummingbirds find them. 'Souvenir de Bonn' is among the oldest abutilons still in gardens, a parlor plant out of the conservatory age, when a variegated flowering maple was the sort of thing one kept in a bright room through winter and carried out to the terrace each summer. The species hails from Brazil; the cultivar name is a keepsake of Bonn, a souvenir that outlasted whoever first carried it home. They are tender, frost being their one real enemy, and in our climate they may sail through a mild winter outdoors or die to the ground and return from the root. Either way they earn their keep, blooming spring to frost and beyond, asking only for sun, rich soil, and water enough to keep the show going. Set them where you pass close, on a patio or against a warm wall, where the lanterns can be read at eye level.
A small, bright green agave with a clean white stripe down the center of each short, broad, toothed leaf, Agave lophantha 'Splendida' is a compact, clumping selection of a species native to South Texas and Mexico. The variegated rosettes stay neat and low, a jewel-box agave for a trough, a container, or the front of a hot, sunny bed.
The tung oil tree is a handsome medium-sized deciduous tree, broad and spreading, with large heart-shaped to lobed leaves up to ten inches across and showy panicles of white flowers, blushed pink and orange at the throat, that open in spring before or with the new foliage. Few flowering trees of the Deep South make a fuller spring show.
Amorpha fruticosa, the false indigo bush, is the largest and most widespread of the native false indigos, a fast, open, deciduous shrub that carries long spires of tiny deep blue-purple flowers, each lit with a single vivid orange anther, at the branch tips in late spring and early summer. From a suckering base rise arching stems six to twelve feet tall, clothed in soft, ferny, pinnate leaves that give off a clean, resinous scent when crushed. In full bloom the whole shrub seems to smoke with color, and the flower spikes hum with bees.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–12 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, pain relief, topical applications
Threadleaf bluestar is grown for two seasons at once: a haze of soft, powder-blue stars in late spring, and a billow of fine, needle-thin foliage that turns a blazing clear gold in fall. Native to the Ouachita Mountains of central Arkansas, Amsonia hubrichtii forms a large, dense, shrub-like clump of upright stems clothed in those threadlike leaves, and the autumn color alone earns a place in any sunny border.
Madeira vine is a fast, twining, deciduous climber with fleshy, heart-shaped leaves and sprays of tiny, fragrant cream-white flowers in late summer and fall. Anredera cordifolia climbs by winding tuberous stems, and a warty crop of aerial tubers along the stems, some as large as a small potato, is the surest mark of the plant and a ready means of increase.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–20 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
topical applications, reproductive health, general wellness
The white-flowered form of swamp milkweed, Asclepias incarnata 'Ice Ballet' carries the same upright, well-mannered habit as the species but trades rosy pink for clusters of pure, cool white, held atop sturdy three-to-four-foot stems through summer. The effect is fresh and luminous in a moist border, and just as useful to wildlife.
The pawpaw is a small, tropical-looking deciduous tree with large, drooping leaves and the largest edible fruit native to this country. In mid to late summer the green, mango-shaped fruit softens to a fragrant custard, banana and mango in one, around rows of big dark seeds, relished by people and raccoons alike. The crushed leaves carry a distinctive odor, and the whole tree reads more like the tropics than a temperate woodland.
Most asters have quit by the time Tatarian aster gets started. Aster tataricus opens in late September and keeps going through October and into November, still looking fresh at the first frost, on stems that stand five or six feet without a stake. The flowers are small, barely an inch across, lavender-blue with a yellow eye, but they arrive in flat-topped clusters by the hundred, and at that height they read as a haze of color at eye level rather than a mound down at your knees.
A rare, semi-evergreen shrub, Baccharis dioica resembles the common groundsel bush, Baccharis halimifolia, but is quite distinct. In 1979, just before Hurricane Frederic did tremendous damage to the Mobile, Alabama area, we found this plant growing behind the dunes on Dauphin Island.
Buddleia davidii 'Attraction' is a more compact butterfly bush than the usual run of the species, forming a rounded shrub of arching branches lined with gray-green leaves. From summer into fall, royal red, fragrant flowers gather in nodding panicles six to ten inches long, drawing butterflies and bees in profusion.
'Lochinch' is one of the most refined of the butterfly bushes, a cross of Buddleia davidii and the silvery Buddleia fallowiana that takes the best of both: dense, fragrant panicles of soft lavender-blue, each tiny flower lit by a small orange eye, over handsome gray-green, almost silver foliage. Compact and rounded, the shrub blooms all summer into fall on the new growth.
'Miss Ruby' is the butterfly bush that finally cracked the color barrier: a striking, near-sterile hybrid of Buddleia davidii and Buddleia globosa carrying racemes of bright, purplish pink, a magenta few other butterfly bushes can touch. The shrub was bred by Dr. Dennis Werner at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina, the source of our cuttings.
A yellow-flowered butterfly bush, Buddleia x weyeriana 'Honeycomb' is a vigorous hybrid of Buddleia globosa and Buddleia davidii that the great Dr. Michael Dirr judged better than the older 'Sungold'. The plant came to Dirr from Crathes Castle Garden in Scotland, bought as the variety 'E.H. Wilson' but proving to be a very different and superior yellow butterfly bush, named 'Honeycomb' and a standout in Georgia trials, flowering as late as Thanksgiving.
Endemic to the mountain scrub of Madagascar, where the plant scrambles along slopes between two and six thousand feet, Buddleja madagascariensis throws out long arching canes that will climb to ten feet given a wall to lean on. The flowers come in late winter and spring on terminal panicles up to ten inches long, opening deep yellow and aging through orange to soft pink along the same spike, all of it carrying a honeyed fragrance strong enough to scent a courtyard. The leaves are narrowly ovate, dark green above, silvery and felted beneath, so the whole shrub seems to flicker when wind moves through the canes.
A small boxwood with narrow, bright green leaves and an unusually showy spring bloom, this is apparently the true Buxus harlandii. The boxwoods commonly sold in the South as B. harlandii, including the variety 'Richard', are, according to Dr. Todd Lasseigne, another Asian species, Buxus bodinieri; the real harlandii is much less often seen.
Callicarpa acuminata, the black beautyberry, is the Mexican cousin of the familiar American beautyberry, a deciduous shrub of arching branches that, in fall, lines the stems with clusters of small, shiny berries in glossy black rather than the usual purple. The dark fruit is a quiet, sophisticated turn on the beautyberry idea, set off by the green leaves and lingering into the cool months.
Everyone who grows the native beautyberry knows the plant by the autumn display: those improbable whorls of magenta-purple fruit circling every stem like something a florist arranged and forgot to bill for. 'Welch's Pink' is that plant, in a color the species was not supposed to have.
The white-fruited form of the Asian beautyberry, Callicarpa dichotoma 'Albifructus' is a quiet pleasure of the late-summer border: instead of the usual magenta, the arching stems hang with luminous, ivory-white berries in elegant clusters, cool and refined where the purple kinds are bold. Native to eastern Asia, in Korea, China, and Japan, the white beautyberry is smaller and more graceful than the American species, and all the more striking for the restraint.
