Abelmoschus manihot wears two faces. To a flower gardener it is the Sunset Hibiscus, a fast tropical perennial that throws up large, pale-yellow blooms with a deep maroon eye all through the warm season, each one open for a day in the manner of its mallow kin. To much of the Pacific and tropical Asia it is something more fundamental: aibika, among the most important leafy vegetables in Papua New Guinea, grown in dooryards from New Guinea to Queensland and across into China and Japan.
Yaupon is the small-leaved evergreen holly of the southeastern United States, native along the coastal plain from Virginia south to Texas and a member of the holly family, Aquifoliaceae. The species carries fine, glossy, oval leaves on pale gray twigs, takes shearing as willingly as boxwood, and shrugs off salt, drought, and heat, a combination that explains a long career as a Southern hedge and topiary plant. 'Dewerth' is a male clone, chosen for a dense, upright habit and unusually small, narrow leaves, and grown not for fruit, which male hollies never carry, but as the pollen partner that lets the berried females set a full crop.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–20 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, mental & emotional well-being, detoxification & cleansing
Ruscus aculeatus 'Wheeler's Variety' is a low, self-fruiting selection of Butcher's Broom, and the whole point of the plant is written into that phrase. The wild species is dioecious, needing a male and a female to set fruit, but 'Wheeler's Variety' is a hermaphroditic clone that carries perfect flowers and so ripens a heavy crop of scarlet berries entirely alone, with no partner required. For a gardener who wants the winter show from a single plant, this is the form to grow.
Salvia microphylla 'Lutea' is an uncommon yellow-flowered form of the littleleaf or baby sage, a small woody shrub of the mountains of Mexico and the borderlands. Where the species carries the usual salvia scarlet or orange-red, 'Lutea' opens soft, pale yellow flowers instead, a quiet and unusual color on a plant otherwise known for hot tones, and blooms over a long season from late spring into fall.
Salix nigra, the black willow, is the largest native willow of North America and a common deciduous tree of Southern wetlands, but 'Webb' is a strikingly different, vase-shaped form that gathers those loose, streamside branches into a small, dense, upright tree. The habit sets the selection apart at once, tidy and shapely where the wild black willow sprawls, while keeping all the toughness and easy water-loving vigor of the species.
Salvia melissodora, the grape-scented sage, is a woody Mexican shrub grown for a scent as much as a flower, since the small lavender-blue blooms carry an unmistakable perfume of grape soda that drifts on warm air. Native to the Sierra Madre from Chihuahua south to Oaxaca, at four to eight thousand feet, the plant flowers in long spikes from late spring right through to frost, an exceptionally long and fragrant season.
'Tuscan Blue' is the robust, broad-leaved aristocrat of the upright rosemaries, a fast, strongly vertical form grown as much for the deep blue flowers as for the kitchen. Thicker in leaf and richer in bloom than the common rosemary, the cultivar is the same Mediterranean herb, Rosmarinus officinalis, now moved by botanists into the genus Salvia as Salvia rosmarinus, though few cooks will trouble to relearn the name.
Salix tristis is a dwarf, gray-leaved native willow and one of the most surprising members of a genus most gardeners picture standing knee-deep in water. This small, tidy shrub was originally collected by Woodlanders in Jefferson County, Florida, where the plant grew in pine flatwoods on well-drained, even dry, sandy sites, the opposite of the streambank home most willows keep. The soft, grayish, woolly-hairy leaves and neat, low frame set the willow apart at a glance.
'Gro-Low' is the ground-hugging form of the native fragrant sumac, a low, wide-spreading deciduous shrub that stays one to two feet tall while reaching six to eight feet across, knitting into a dense, weed-smothering carpet. The glossy trifoliate leaves are often mistaken at a glance for poison ivy or poison oak but are entirely harmless, and a crushed leaf gives off the clean, lemony scent that names the species.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Groundcover
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Salix integra 'Hakuro Nishiki', the dappled willow, is an elegant small willow grown above all for the show its new growth makes in spring. As the shoots unfold, the glossy leaves emerge splashed and mottled in pink and creamy white, so freely that the whole plant reads as a soft cloud of blossom-pink from a distance, before the variegation settles to green and white through summer. The Japanese cultivar name, roughly white-dappled brocade, catches the effect exactly.
Rougeplant is a small, soft-stemmed perennial of the pokeweed family, native to Florida, Texas, and the warm Americas, grown for the long show of tiny flowers and the shining strings of bright red berries that follow. Where common pokeweed is coarse and towering, rougeplant is refined and knee-high or less, with small leaves and delicate, arching sprays that carry flowers and ripe fruit at the same time for months on end.
Hardiness
Zones 8–9
Light
Part Shade
Height
6–18 in.
Spread
8–12 in.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, digestive health
Where the upright rosemaries reach for the sky, the Prostrate Rosemary lies down and flows, spilling in long, trailing, aromatic stems that pour over a wall, a bank, or the rim of a raised bed. The plant is the same species that flavors the Sunday roast, Rosmarinus officinalis, lately reclassified by botanists as Salvia rosmarinus, but grown here in a low, spreading form that trades the shrub's usual stiffness for a soft, cascading habit.
Littleleaf sumac is a big, bushy deciduous shrub of west Texas, the Southwest, and adjoining Mexico, built for heat, sun, and drought. The compound leaves are made up of tiny leaflets that give a fine, almost feathery texture, and they turn rose to purple in fall, an unusual and lovely tone among the sumacs. Tough and dryland-hardy, the plant is well worth trying in the South and any hot, well-drained garden.
Rhus javanica, better known today as Rhus chinensis, is the Chinese sumac or nutgall tree, a fast, adaptable deciduous large shrub or small tree of East and Southeast Asia, in time reaching fifteen to twenty-five feet. The pinnate leaves, carried on downy shoots and set along a distinctively winged leaf stalk, turn vivid yellow to red in autumn, and creamy panicles of small flowers open in late summer, feeding bees when much of the garden has finished.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
12–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
'Arp' is the rosemary to grow where ordinary rosemary freezes out, the cold-hardiest of the common culinary rosemaries and a genuine boon to gardeners north of the herb's usual range. Selected in 1972 from a plant growing at Arp, in east Texas, by the noted herb grower Madalene Hill, this selection carries the same needle-like evergreen foliage, aromatic and useful in the kitchen, on a robust, bushy, upright frame, with the bonus of a distinct lemon note in the scent and a soft gray-green cast to the leaves.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
Among the upright rosemaries, 'Miss Jessopp's Upright' stands as the tall, columnar backbone of the herb garden, sending stiff, aromatic branches skyward in a narrow plume rather than the low sprawl of the creeping kinds. The cultivar carries the name of Euphemia Jessopp, an Edwardian gardener whose plant the great plantsman E. A. Bowles selected and passed into wider cultivation, and the shrub has been grown under her name for more than a century. Botanists have lately moved rosemary out of the old genus and into Salvia, so that the plant now answers to Salvia rosmarinus as often as to the familiar Rosmarinus officinalis, though gardeners and cooks are in no hurry to give up the older word.
The pineapple lily, Eucomis comosa, is a summer-flowering bulb from the grasslands and damp meadows of eastern South Africa, grown the world over for one of the most whimsical flower spikes in the plant kingdom. From a large bulb rise broad, strap-shaped leaves, and out of their center in mid to late summer climbs a stout stalk two to three feet tall, densely packed with dozens of small, starry, greenish-white flowers and crowned at the very top with a tuft of leafy green bracts, the whole thing a dead ringer for a pineapple.
A medium to large deciduous shrub closely related to the native buttonbush, Adina rubella wears smaller leaves and bears similar but daintier flowers: round, scented heads of pale pink and white, each bristling with styles into a small Sputnik, carried over a long season from early summer well into fall. The pincushion blooms draw bees and butterflies just as the buttonbushes do, and an open, arching habit gives the shrub a fine-textured grace.
A medium-sized evergreen shrub still little known in cultivation, Adina pilulifera carries small, glossy leaves and, in midsummer, round white flower heads about an inch across, each bristling with protruding styles like a tiny Sputnik. The effect is curious and charming, a pincushion of white set among shining foliage, and the evergreen habit earns the shrub a place where the deciduous buttonbushes leave a winter gap.
