Granite gooseberry is a rare native shrub of the rocky, granitic soils of the Southeast, turning up in widely scattered localities from Georgia to Texas. A low, deciduous plant of two to four feet, the arching branches root where they touch the ground and knit slowly into colonies, and the small, three-lobed leaves and purple, red-spined stems give the shrub a fine, distinctive texture.
'Camilla's Blush' is a choice clone of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, selected and introduced by Jeff and Lisa Beasley of Transplant Nursery in Lavonia, Georgia, who named the plant for their eldest daughter. The shrub came to us as cuttings shared by our friend and fellow plant nut Dean Jolly. From the widespread wild species, this selection was chosen for an especially generous show of soft pink flowers and vigorous, willing growth.
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
Ilex opaca 'Jersey Knight' is a male American holly bred for one essential job, pollination, and vigorous enough to stand on merit besides. Selected from the wild in New Jersey in 1945, this clone carries dark, semi-glossy, olive-green leaves on a strong pyramidal frame that holds branches right to the ground, a full, handsome evergreen that happens to bear no fruit.
Salvia littae, Litta's purple sage, is a bold, late-flowering Mexican salvia from the cool cloud forests of Oaxaca, grown for thick, plush spikes of fuzzy, purplish-pink to magenta flowers that open when the gardening year is nearly done. On stout spikes a foot or more long, the densely felted blooms have a rich, tactile quality unusual even among salvias, and the color glows in the low light of late autumn.
Salvia darcyi, the Galeana sage, is a bold Mexican sage grown for one of the purest scarlets in the whole tribe of salvias, a color that reads across a garden and pulls hummingbirds from a distance. Through the heat of summer and well into fall, upright spikes of large, bright orange-red flowers rise above a mound of soft, gray-green, heart-shaped leaves that release a clean minty scent when brushed. Few tender salvias give so long or so vivid a show.
Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue' is a big, vigorous perennial sage grown for one of the truest blues in the garden, a deep gentian to cobalt held in near-black calyces that give the selection its name. Through the warm months, tall spikes rise above soft, hairy, deep green leaves and open in a long, generous run, and few hardy perennials offer a blue this saturated for so long a season.
Sabal palmetto, the Cabbage Palmetto, is the classic palm of the Southeastern coast and the State Tree of both South Carolina and Florida. Blue-green, costapalmate (fan) leaves crown a straight trunk that thickens to about a foot and a half across, and the whole reads as the very image of the coastal South. The palm grows commonly to around thirty feet and climbs considerably taller in Florida.
Salvia puberula, the downy sage, is a big, late-flowering Mexican sage grown for tall spikes of deep magenta-pink flowers that open when the year is nearly done. The blooms are large, nearly four inches long, gathered in showy clusters atop the spikes, and the color is rich and saturated, glowing at a season when little else is in flower. The spikes cut well for the vase.
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.
Sabatia dodecandra var. kennedyana, the Plymouth rose-gentian, is a globally rare perennial wildflower of the gentian family, treasured for large, starry, rose-pink flowers carried on slender stalks above a low basal rosette. Each bloom opens flat to nine, ten, or eleven clear pink petals around a yellow eye ringed in red, a jewel-like design more often expected of a cultivated exotic than a native pondshore plant. The genus name honors Liberato Sabbati, an eighteenth-century Italian botanist, while the epithet kennedyana remembers the botanist George Golding Kennedy, whose name the older common name, Kennedy's marsh pink, carries still.
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.
Salvia greggii 'Furman's Red' is a small, woody sage grown for a long, generous run of deep, true-red flowers that carry from early summer straight through fall. The tubular, two-lipped blooms glow against fine, dark green, aromatic leaves, and few small shrubs bloom so steadily for so little trouble, feeding hummingbirds and bees the whole time.
Sabal louisiana, the Louisiana Palmetto, is best pictured as a dwarf palmetto grown large. Where the familiar Sabal minor stays stemless, this palm builds a stout trunk in time and carries broad, blue-green, fan-shaped leaves on a far more robust frame, which is why the plant has been passed back and forth in the books, treated sometimes as a form of Sabal minor and sometimes as a hybrid with Sabal texana.
Rudbeckia speciosa var. newmanii is the showy coneflower, a compact, free-flowering black-eyed Susan that many gardeners will know better under the name Rudbeckia fulgida var. speciosa. Smaller, tidier, and even more profuse than the ubiquitous border stalwart 'Goldsturm', the plant covers a neat, clump-forming mound in a long procession of deep gold daisies, each ray fanning out around a dark chocolate-brown central cone from midsummer well into fall.
The 'Katie' Ruellia is the well-mannered dwarf of the Mexican petunia, a low, spreading mound barely a foot high that blooms without pause from summer until frost. Above narrow, strap-like, dark green leaves open a steady succession of bluish-purple, trumpet-shaped flowers, each an inch and a half across and lasting but a single day, replaced the next morning by a fresh crop. In Charleston, South Carolina, gardeners know the tribe by the charming old name Breakfast Flower, for the way the blooms greet the day and are gone by evening.
The single white Lady Banks rose is the wild original, the mother of the whole clan, and to many noses the most fragrant rose in the garden. This is the species itself, Rosa banksiae in the true, single-flowered form, a vigorous, all but thornless evergreen climber from the hills and gorges of central China, capable of thirty or forty feet where a wall or a big tree will hold the weight. In spring the long, smooth green canes disappear under great hanging sprays of small single white flowers, each with a boss of gold stamens and a clean, sweet, violet-like scent that carries across a garden.
'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.
