One genus, a garden's worth of virtues. Viburnums give flower, fragrance, fruit, fall color, and structure across the seasons, which is why gardeners who know them plant them by the dozen.
Luzon viburnum is one of the quiet unknowns of Southern gardening, a handsome large shrub grown around Houston for years and almost nowhere else in the United States. Woodlanders collected this plant in the Houston area, where the species had already proven durable and undemanding in Gulf Coast heat. Viburnum luzonicum comes from open forest, scrub, and roadside thickets across southern China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and the epithet points to Luzon, largest of the Philippine islands, from which Robert Allen Rolfe described the species at Kew.
They carry their Roman name almost unchanged. Tinus was what the Romans called the shrub two thousand years ago, the name Pliny the Elder set down in his Natural History, and when Linnaeus came to catalogue them he simply kept it. The reason gardeners have held onto Viburnum tinus just as long is that they flower in the cold. While the rest of the garden is shut down for winter, they cover themselves in tight clusters of deep carmine buds that open a few at a time across weeks into small white flowers, so they carry both colors at once through the bleakest stretch of the year. The foliage is the second argument, dense and dark and glossy, evergreen to the ground with none of the gapping that lesser shrubs fall into. 'Spring Bouquet' is the compact, well-behaved selection, rounding into a tidy four to six feet, which makes it the one to reach for when you want a hedge, a low screen, or a piece of evergreen structure that also happens to bloom in February. Metallic blue-black berries follow for the birds, set best when more than one plant grows nearby. They take shade, salt, and coastal wind without complaint. Few evergreens hand you this much in the dead of winter, which is precisely the season you'll be grateful for it.
The hybrid that earned a name the hard way. Viburnum 'Lord Byron' is a Southern-bred cross of Viburnum obovatum, Walter's viburnum, with Viburnum rufidulum, the rusty blackhaw, created by the plantsman Paul Cox of the San Antonio Botanical Garden and named for his son.
Few shrubs wear a name as plainly as this one. Odoratissimum is Latin for the most fragrant, the sweetest-scented, and sweet viburnum earns the superlative in late spring, when conical panicles of tiny white flowers open across the canopy and carry a soft, honeyed perfume on warm air. A member of the moschatel family, Adoxaceae, and a cousin of the elders and the arrowwoods, Viburnum odoratissimum ranges as a wild plant from the Himalayan foothills of India through Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam to China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, a broad Asian sweep that hints at the plant's easy adaptability in the warm garden.
A viburnum grown for the leaves rather than the flowers, and one of the rarest evergreens in the American nursery trade. Viburnum propinquum was described by the botanist William Hemsley in 1888 from the temperate forests of China, and the plant ranges through central and southern China, Taiwan, and north to Luzon in the Philippines. The species name comes from the Latin propinquus, meaning near or akin, a botanist's nod to the plant's close kinship with several related Asian viburnums. Woodlanders is among the very few nurseries anywhere to offer the Chinese evergreen viburnum.
Some viburnums are grown for the eye and some for the nose; the Burkwood viburnums are firmly the latter. Viburnum x burkwoodii is a cross between the intensely fragrant Viburnum carlesii and the glossy evergreen Viburnum utile, first raised by the brothers Burkwood and their partner Skipwith at their nursery near Kingston-on-Thames in England in 1924. 'Park Farm Hybrid' is a sister seedling from that same celebrated work, selected for a bolder flower and a deeper bud.
A neat, dome-shaped evergreen bred for foliage and form. Viburnum x globosum is a garden hybrid between Viburnum calvum and the well-known Viburnum davidii, and 'Jermyn's Globe' was selected as the best seedling from a batch raised at the celebrated Hillier Nurseries in England around 1964, chosen for the way the plant rounds into a dense, self-shaping globe. The cultivar name honors Hillier's Jermyns arboretum in Hampshire.
A tough, glossy evergreen born of two Chinese parents and a Prague nursery. Viburnum x pragense is the cross of the leatherleaf viburnum, Viburnum rhytidophyllum, with the service viburnum, Viburnum utile, first raised by the plantsman Josef Vik at the Municipal Nurseries of Prague in 1955 and named for the city in 1959. The epithet pragense simply means of Prague, a rare instance of a garden hybrid carrying a birthplace rather than a botanist.
