Euonymus fortunei 'Wolong Ghost'

This luminous evergreen groundcover came into gardens through Heronswood Nursery, from a collection the plantsman Dan Hinkley made on the slopes above the Wolong Panda Preserve in western China. The long, dark green, sharply pointed leaves are laced with bold silver-white veins, a ghostly netting that gives the cultivar the second half of the name and lifts a shaded corner out of the gloom.

Euonymus fortunei, the wintercreeper, belongs to the staff-vine family, Celastraceae, and is famous for leading a double life: a flat, ground-hugging carpet in youth that, given a wall or a trunk, throws out clinging rootlets and climbs like ivy into a taller, shrubbier, flowering form. The genus name comes from the Greek for good name, an old euphemism, and may in truth honor Euonyme, mother of the Furies in myth, a wry nod to the poisonous nature of the tribe; the epithet fortunei remembers Robert Fortune, the Scottish plant hunter who carried so many East Asian plants west.

Beauty here comes with a frank caution, one Dan Hinkley himself raised. Wintercreeper is vigorous to a fault, and across much of the United States the species has proven aggressively invasive, climbing and smothering trees and escaping into woodlands where birds spread the seed. All parts are toxic if eaten. None of this need rule the plant out of a garden, but it does argue for planting with intent, in a bed that can be watched and clipped rather than turned loose near wild ground.

Put to considered use, 'Wolong Ghost' is a superb foliage plant for shade, the silver veining glowing against ferns and coarser leaves such as autumn fern (Dryopteris erythrosora), Japanese climbing fern (Lygodium japonicum), and Selaginella braunii. Grow the plant as a flat evergreen carpet at the foot of a wall, along a woodland path, or down a shady bank, or let the stems climb a surface for a living green tapestry. Give any soil that drains, sun to deep shade, and a yearly edit with the shears to keep the spread honest.