This Chinese dogwood is a spreading, small to medium deciduous tree with clean foliage and showy white-bracted flowers. Unlike the native American flowering dogwood, the bracts are sharply pointed. The tree flowers about a month later than Cornus florida, and is apparently immune or resistant to some of the disease problems that trouble Cornus florida in certain areas. A fine ornamental for an open, semi-shady lawn or border.
'Graniteville' is a low, ground-hugging selection of Cyrilla racemiflora, the native Titi, and one of the more distinctive forms of a plant already known for variability. Where the species can build into a small tree, this Woodlanders introduction stays wide and knee-high, and the story behind the plant is a piece of local botanizing: we propagated 'Graniteville' from an almost prostrate individual found years ago on an eroded sandhills seepage slope near Graniteville, South Carolina, and the ground-hugging habit has held true ever since in cultivation.
Dianella tasmanica 'Variegata' is a strappy evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage: arching, sword-shaped leaves boldly striped in white and green that stay dense and upright through the season and lend crisp, year-round structure to a bed. In spring and early summer, airy panicles of small, star-shaped, blue to violet flowers rise on wiry stems above the leaves, followed by glossy, deep blue berries that gleam against the pale striping, an unusual and long-lasting ornamental touch that gives the plant a second season of interest.
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
Some plants are grown for beauty; a few are grown for the story of their survival, and Echinacea tennesseensis, the Tennessee coneflower, is one of the latter. Endemic to a handful of limestone cedar glades around Nashville, the species was once believed extinct, then rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century clinging to those thin, sun-baked soils. The Tennessee coneflower went on to become one of the first plants ever listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, and after decades of protection and propagation was formally delisted in 2011, recovered. To grow this coneflower is to keep a small piece of that comeback going.
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.
A relic of the old Southern wilds, Erythrina herbacea, the coral bean, is a plant that commands attention, graceful yet defiant, wild yet refined. A legume native across the coastal Southeast, the coral bean shifts habit with the winter: in frost-free zones the plant grows as a woody shrub, branching boldly above the ground, while farther north the top dies down with the first hard freeze, only to rise again from a thick, gnarled rootstock when the heat returns, an emblem of Southern resilience.
Carolina jessamine is the state flower of South Carolina and one of the most beloved evergreen vines of the South, prized for the wash of fragrant yellow trumpets that opens the gardening year. 'Margarita' is the cold-hardy answer to that beauty, a selection that carries the same sweet-scented gold well north of where the species usually gives out.
The name does the plant no favors. "Swamp sunflower" conjures boggy ground and standing water, which is where you find the plant in the wild, yes, but not where you need to plant this sunflower in the garden. Helianthus angustifolius tolerates wet soils in nature because wet soils are where the plant manages to grow without being outcompeted. Given good sun and average garden moisture, the sunflower performs considerably better and needs no drainage problem to justify a place. The name is a provenance note, not a planting instruction.
Hibiscus grandiflorus, the swamp rose mallow, is a magnificent native perennial of the southeastern United States, grown for enormous soft-pink blooms and broad, velvety, gray-green leaves. Rising to eight or ten feet on stout stems, the plant brings a lush, almost tropical presence to the summer garden, at home in a wetland but just as striking in an ordinary bed or beside a pond.
'Mariesii' is a piece of hydrangea history still in commerce. In the late 1870s the English plant hunter Charles Maries, collecting in Japan for the famous Veitch nursery, sent home the first lacecap hydrangea to reach the West, at a time when European gardeners knew only the round mopheads. That introduction, named 'Mariesii' in his honor, opened Western eyes to the wild, flat-topped grace of the lacecap and became the parent of a whole line of classic cultivars, among them 'Mariesii Grandiflora', 'Mariesii Lilacina', and the blue 'Mariesii Perfecta'.
Hypericum lissophloeus is the tree among the St. John's Worts, a graceful evergreen that climbs to ten feet or more on slender trunks dressed in smooth, copper-colored bark that peels in thin sheets. The leaves are needle-fine and deep green, so that from a distance the plant reads almost like a small conifer until summer, when small bright yellow flowers scatter along the stems and settle the question of family.
Iris cristata is the iris scaled down for the woodland floor, a dwarf native barely six inches high that spreads into low, overlapping fans of bright green blades. In mid to late spring the mats light up with small flowers, an inch and a half to two inches across, in soft lavender-blue to violet, each fall stamped with a white patch and a raised orange or yellow ridge. That ridge is the crest that gives the plant both the Latin name cristata, crested, and the common name crested iris, and the feature sets the species apart from the bearded and beardless irises alike.
Among the wild irises of North America, Iris fulva is the one that broke the color rules. Where the family runs to blues, purples, and yellows, the copper iris opens in warm coppery red to burnt orange, a shade no other native iris offers, carried on slender stems in late spring and early summer with a soft, slightly drooping poise. The Latin fulva, meaning tawny or reddish-brown, records that unusual color, and the common names, copper iris and red iris, say the same thing more plainly.
A small crested iris with the carriage of an orchid and a quietly extraordinary biography. Iris japonica was named by Carl Peter Thunberg in 1794. Thunberg was a protege of Linnaeus and one of the only Western botanists allowed into Japan during the country's closed period, from 1775 to 1778, so much of what he brought back is, in a real sense, the first documented record of Japanese flora in Western science. The species had already reached Europe two years earlier, carried out of China by Thomas Evans of the East India Company in 1792. By the 1820s Pierre-Joseph Redoute, the same artist whose rose paintings turn up on every aunt's tea tray, was painting the plant under the older name Iris fimbriata in his Choix des plus belles Fleurs. A treasure of cultivated gardens for more than two centuries.
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.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Longspire' is the selection chosen for its flowers: a form that carries notably long, white racemes, arching sprays of small fragrant blooms that outdo the wild plant for length and presence in early summer.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and brilliant fall color. 'Sarah Eve' is the exception in the family, the first pink sweetspire: the small flowers are essentially white, but they are carried on rosy-pink pedicels that tint the whole arching raceme a soft, distinctive pale pink, a color no other Itea offers.
Itea, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, their name taken from the Greek word for willow. Itea yunnanensis is the Yunnan sweetspire, an evergreen species from southwestern China, close to the Chinese sweetspire but lower and more spreading, with more leathery, darker green leaves that are somewhat holly-like and toothed on juvenile plants and smooth-edged at maturity. In spring the plant carries slender four-inch racemes of small white flowers.
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.
