The genus name says it: Callicarpa, from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, beautiful fruit, a genus named for exactly what it does. Callicarpa americana, the American beautyberry, is the southeastern native that gives the genus a calling card. From late August into November, the plant sets dense clusters of small drupes in a luminous magenta-purple, a color that registers as almost unreal in the late-summer landscape, somewhere between fuchsia and amethyst, with no real precedent among native fruits. The berries gather in tight whorls around the stem at every leaf node, all the way down the arching branches, so that a mature shrub in October looks less like a shrub bearing fruit than a ribbon of purple glass beads strung along the branches.
Hardiness
Zones 7–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, immune support
Japanese cedar is a tall, pyramidal to conical evergreen conifer, and the great timber tree of Japan, where the sugi soars past a hundred feet and lines temple avenues and mountain forests alike. The blue-green needles are held close and awl-shaped, taking on a bronzy, purple-bronze cast through cold winters before recovering their color in spring. The reddish-brown bark peels in long fibrous strips down a straight, buttressed trunk.
True cardamom, Elettaria cardamomum, is a lush, aromatic member of the ginger family and the source of green cardamom, the ancient and costly spice traded for millennia along the Silk Road and across the Indian Ocean. Native to the humid, evergreen hill forests of southern India and Sri Lanka, the plant grows in the dappled shade of the understory, in deep, fertile, always-moist soil. Ranked historically among the most valuable spices in the world, cardamom carries a history as rich as the flavor.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
3–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
Black gum is one of the longest-lived hardwoods in eastern North America; individual trees have been aged past six hundred and fifty years, standing quietly in swamp margins and rocky uplands while everything human around them came and went. The names alone are a small history lesson. Nyssa was a water nymph of Greek myth, sylvatica means of the woods, so the botanical name reads as water nymph of the forest; tupelo comes from the Creek ito and opilwa, tree and swamp; and the old northern name pepperidge is the one a Connecticut baker borrowed for her farm and her bread company. Curiously, no part of the tree is gummy at all. What black gum does own is the autumn. They are among the first trees to turn and among the fiercest, the glossy summer leaves igniting into scarlet, orange, and deep wine-purple weeks before the rest of the woods has given the season a thought, an early flare that signals birds to the ripening blue fruit. The wood is so cross-grained it is nearly impossible to split, which sent it into tool handles, chopping bowls, and, where trunks went hollow with age, into bee gums, the log hives that made gum a synonym for beehive across Appalachia. Black gum is notoriously hard to move at any size, which is exactly why you so rarely see a big one for sale, and exactly why you should start one small, now, and let them outlive you.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
30–40 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support, reproductive health
Quercus alba, the white oak, is the grandfather of the eastern forest, a slow, massive, long-lived tree that can stand for centuries and outlast the people who plant them. The most famous of all was the Wye Oak of Wye Mills, Maryland, a single white oak that stood for more than four hundred and sixty years and served as Maryland's state tree until a storm brought the giant down in 2002. The broad, rounded crown, the pale, scaly, ash-gray bark, and the deeply lobed, blue-green leaves are the picture most people carry of an oak.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
50–80 ft.
Spread
50–80 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
Rohdea japonica, the sacred lily or Nippon lily, is a bold, slow, tufted evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage, and this selection carries the darkest leaves of all, an almost black, glossy green that anchors a shaded planting through the whole year and lights up a winter landscape when little else holds. Rather sizeable red berries ripen in tight clusters, half-hidden at the base of the leaves, a quiet second season for anyone who looks closely.
A native tree that bites back, and can numb a toothache. Zanthoxylum clava-herculis, the toothache tree or Hercules' club, is a small to medium deciduous tree of the citrus family, native along the coastal Southeast from Virginia to Florida and Texas. The genus name Zanthoxylum means yellow wood, and the species clava-herculis, the club of Hercules, names the stout, spiny, club-shaped trunk that is the tree's signature.
The century plant is the great architectural agave, a broad rosette of thick, gray green, spine-tipped leaves that can spread six to eight feet across, each leaf edged with hooked teeth and ending in a hard dark spine. The form is bold and symmetrical, a piece of living sculpture for a hot, dry corner, and the silver cast of the foliage carries the planting through every season.
The uncommon white-berried form of coral ardisia, Ardisia crenata 'Alba' is a small, neat evergreen shrub of glossy, scallop-edged dark green leaves, hung in fall and winter with clusters of round white berries in place of the usual coral red. The pale fruit and shining foliage give a long season of quiet interest, indoors in a bright room or out in a shaded, frost-free garden.
Buddleja salviifolia, the sage-leaf butterfly bush, is a medium to large evergreen shrub from the sun-soaked hillsides of South Africa, and despite the exotic origin the plant has proven remarkably hardy in southeastern gardens, coming through winters at the University of Georgia's Athens trials with quiet resilience.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–12 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Buttonbush is a rounded, deciduous native shrub, easily trained as a small multi-stemmed tree, grown for the curious globe-shaped flowers that give the plant its name. From early summer into fall, creamy-white pincushion balls about an inch across stud the branches, each a sphere of tiny tubular flowers with projecting styles that lend a fireworks effect, intensely fragrant and alive with bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Hardiness
Zones 5–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, general wellness, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications
The native fringetree is one of the great small trees of the southern spring. Chionanthus virginicus, a deciduous large shrub or small tree, often multi-stemmed, hangs the whole canopy with fleecy, drooping panicles of narrow white petals in spring, soft as torn paper and lightly fragrant, a look that earned the old country names old man's beard and grancy graybeard. On female plants the flowers give way to clusters of raisin-sized, deep blue-purple fruits that birds take quickly.
Native to the open prairies and meadows of North America, Coreopsis lanceolata, the lanceleaf coreopsis, has long been admired for bright, golden-yellow blooms and an easy, hardy nature. This perennial wildflower has been a staple of North American landscapes for a very long time, growing across a wide range of climates and soils, from sandy coastal ground to the rich prairies of the Midwest.
The botanical name reads like a compliment: Diospyros joins the Greek dios, divine, to pyros, grain, so the genus translates roughly as "fruit of the gods," a lofty title for a tree that drops sweet, homely orange fruit onto the forest floor each autumn. The common name travels the other direction, plain and American, from the Powhatan word putchamin for a dried fruit, a reminder that Native peoples were drying persimmons into cakes long before the botanists arrived.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
55–60 ft.
Spread
30–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
The loquat, Eriobotrya japonica, is a handsome broadleaved evergreen of the rose family, kin to apples, pears, and hawthorns, grown for the bold foliage and the early, unusual fruit. Native to the warm-temperate hills of central China and cultivated in Japan for more than a thousand years, the loquat has traveled with settlers throughout the mild-winter world, from the Mediterranean to the American South, where old dooryard trees are a familiar sight. The large, leathery leaves, deeply veined and toothed along the edges, give the tree a lush, almost tropical presence year round.
The horticulturist Scott Ogden, in Garden Bulbs for the South, sets the scene: the Japanese roof iris, Iris tectorum, is famous in the native country as a flower for planting on sod roofs, just as houseleeks are used on the cottage roofs of France. In gardens the silky green fans of leaves form large patches, a fine subject for the foreground of a shady border, and in April the ruffled, orchid-like blooms appear among the handsome leaves. This is the common form, in which the flowers open a rich mottled blue, veined and freckled toward the center, with white crests.
Kerria is a monotypic genus, a single species that stands alone in the rose family (Rosaceae), native to the mountain woodlands of China and Japan. The old-fashioned kerria has bright green, arching stems and toothed leaves, and in spring the branches light up with flowers that in the common double form look like tiny golden roses. The genus honors William Kerr, the Kew plant hunter who sent the double-flowered form back to England from Canton in the early 1800s, and in Japan the plant is beloved as yamabuki, a name woven through centuries of poetry celebrating that spring yellow.
Liatris spicata, the blazing star or gayfeather, sends up rockets of feathery purple in the heart of summer, one of the great vertical accents of the North American prairie. The species is native to the moist meadows, prairies, and wet savannas of eastern North America, where the flower spikes once rose in their thousands among the tall grasses. Set against those horizontal sweeps of grass, the erect, bottlebrush spikes give any planting a jolt of structure and color.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
immune support, respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, digestive health
Monarda fistulosa, wild bergamot, is one of the great native perennials of the North American prairie, a hardy, aromatic member of the mint family loved for showy heads of lavender-pink and for a fragrance like oregano crossed with mint. The species grows wild in meadows, prairies, and open woods across most of the continent, and brings both vivid summer color and a deep well of history to the garden.
