Callistemon salignus, the willow bottlebrush, is the graceful one, a large shrub or small tree hung with narrow, willow-like leaves and lit each spring by silky new growth of bright pink to copper, the plant's finest moment. The brushes that follow are soft and pale, creamy white to lemon, sometimes flushed pink in selected forms, and the trunk carries a beautiful papery white bark that peels away in thin sheets. Few bottlebrush read as elegant; the willow bottlebrush does.
Callistemon macropunctatus, the scarlet bottlebrush, is a plant of the drier inland country of southeastern Australia, and the toughness shows. The narrow, sharply pointed leaves are studded with large oil glands, the big dots the species epithet names, and release a sharp, resinous scent when crushed. Flowering runs from olive-green in bud to a deep scarlet as the brushes open across late spring and summer, vivid against the stiff foliage.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Rudbeckia missouriensis is the black-eyed Susan of the Ozark glades, a tough, long-lived native that covers itself in glowing orange-yellow daisies from the first heat of summer straight through to frost. Narrow, hairy, gray-green leaves and slender stems give the plant a finer, softer look than the coarse garden Susans, and the sheer length of bloom sets the species apart, flowering on through the drought and heat that shut down lesser perennials.
The one palm truly native to the American West. Washingtonia filifera, the California fan palm or desert fan palm, is the only palm native to the western United States, gathering in stately groves around desert springs and seeps across the Colorado, Mojave, and Sonoran deserts of California, Arizona, and northwestern Mexico. The genus honors George Washington, and the species name filifera, thread-bearing, names the curling white fibers that hang between the segments of each fan.
Salvia greggii 'Rachel' is an uncommon white-flowered form of the autumn sage, the normally red-flowered small shrub of the Texas and Mexican borderlands, and the plant came to Woodlanders from the Texas plantsman Greg Grant. The clean white flowers are a soft surprise in a species best known for scarlet, and 'Rachel' carries a second twist as well: the leaves are lightly variegated, speckled and dusted with cream, so the plant reads bright even out of bloom.
