'Pocomoke' is one of the smallest crape myrtles in cultivation, a dense, dwarf mound released by the U.S. National Arboretum in 1998 from the breeding program of Dr. Donald Egolf. A hybrid of the common crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) and the Japanese species (Lagerstroemia fauriei), 'Pocomoke' belongs to the group of Arboretum introductions named for Native American tribes and rivers, and carries the deep rose-pink flowers that set the selection apart at such a tiny scale.
Every so often a plant arrives not from a breeder's bench but from a neighbor's yard, and Lantana camara 'Miss Huff' is one of those happy accidents. The selection was found in cultivation near Athens, Georgia, in the garden of the Miss Huff for whom the plant is named, and introduced to the trade by the former Goodness Grows Nursery. What set this lantana apart was cold tolerance: where most of the tribe sulk and die at the first hard freeze, 'Miss Huff' has proven the hardiest lantana in commerce, with well-established clumps shrugging off brief dips to a few degrees below zero and returning faithfully from the root even in zone 7.
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
Where the cardinal flower runs to scarlet, Lobelia siphilitica answers in blue. The great blue lobelia sends up leafy spikes packed with inch-long, two-lipped flowers of clear, saturated blue in late summer and early fall, one of the truest blues in the native flora and a gift to the garden at a tired time of year. The species grows wild across eastern and central North America in moist meadows, low woods, and along streamsides.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Leo' is the coral honeysuckle at its free-flowering best, a selection of the native red honeysuckle that covers itself in bright red, yellow-throated trumpets over an unusually long season. The tubular flowers pour nectar for ruby-throated hummingbirds, which find the vine as irresistible as gardeners do, and the blue-green leaves, some fused right around the stem, make a cool foil for all that heat.
Bold, burnished orange trumpets in generous early-summer clusters make Lonicera × tellmanniana one of the most striking climbing honeysuckles ever raised. The hybrid crosses the American coral honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens, with the large-flowered Chinese Lonicera tragophylla, and takes the best of each: vivid color, strong growth, and clean foliage, without the invasive streak of the weedy honeysuckles.
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.
Few shrubs carry as much history as the oleander, grown around the Mediterranean and across the warm world since antiquity. The name Nerium traces to the Greek neros, meaning moist or watery, a nod to the streamsides and dry watercourses where oleander naturally takes hold, while the old name oleander seems to braid together olea, the olive, and the leathery, lance-shaped leaves the two plants share. Those dark green leaves stand in tidy whorls of three along long, sparingly branched stems, giving the shrub a poised, upright architecture even out of flower.
Osmanthus x fortunei 'Natchez' is a hybrid that takes the best of two parents. The cross joins Osmanthus fragrans, the sweet olive treasured for its perfume, with Osmanthus heterophyllus, the false holly valued for tough, spiny, evergreen foliage, and 'Natchez' inherits both gifts: a dense, glossy, holly-leaved frame and a flood of fragrance in fall. The hybrid takes the name of the old river town of Natchez, Mississippi, a nod to the Deep South gardens where these tea olives have long been at home.
Before European settlement reshaped the eastern landscape, Prunus americana was a fixture at the forest edge: thicket-forming, thorny, and extravagantly beautiful in early spring when the plum covered itself in white flowers before the leaves had even stirred. The Lakota knew the plum as kañta, the Cherokee as gunasdv, and across dozens of nations from the Great Plains to the Appalachians the tree was considered a plant of genuine importance. The fruits were eaten fresh, dried into cakes, and worked into pemmican, the dense, calorie-rich mixture of dried meat, fat, and fruit that sustained people through long winters and longer journeys. The inner bark was used medicinally, and the dense, close-grained wood was worked into tools. This was not an ornamental plant in the minds of the people who knew it first. The plum was a resource, in the fullest sense.
Prunus caroliniana, the Carolina cherry laurel, is a fast, dense broadleaf evergreen native to the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, from North Carolina to Texas. The glossy, deep green, finely toothed leaves and tight, upright habit make the tree one of the South's most useful evergreen screens, and the crushed foliage carries the sharp almond, maraschino-cherry scent that marks the genus.
Ptelea trifoliata, the hop tree or wafer ash, is a unique and underappreciated native, a small, bushy deciduous tree of eastern and central North America. Highly adaptable, the plant takes dry, rocky ground as readily as moist, well-drained sites, which makes the hop tree a fine choice for naturalized landscapes, pollinator gardens, and woodland edges.
'Aromi Sunrise' is a deciduous azalea from the storied breeding program of Dr. Eugene Aromi, the University of South Alabama professor who spent decades teaching heat-shy azaleas to flourish along the Gulf Coast. Introduced in 1987, this hybrid marries the bold Knap Hill azalea 'Hiawatha' with the native Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, so the plant inherits both the size and clarity of the English strains and the toughness and fragrance of a southern wildflower. The result is exactly what Aromi chased across more than a thousand crosses: a large-flowered, sweet-scented, heat-tolerant azalea for gardens where the classic mountain sorts fail.
This is a rare and radiant selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen for flowers of pure, clear yellow. Where the species usually runs to golden-orange, this form holds a clean, buttery, luminous yellow, a color that lights up the spring woodland like sunshine slipping through the canopy. For gardeners and collectors who love the native azaleas, a truly pure-yellow austrinum is an uncommon prize.
'Admiral Semmes' is the best known and easiest to grow of the Dodd nurseries' Confederate Series of azaleas, a deciduous hybrid built for the Deep South's heat and humidity. The cross joins the native Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, with the large-flowered Exbury hybrid 'Hotspur Yellow', and was raised at Dodd and Dodd Nurseries in Semmes, Alabama. The plant takes its name from the Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes, and went on to win the Georgia Gold Medal in 2007.
The pink Cherokee rose is a big, vigorous, early-flowering climber grown for one glorious effect: large, single, silvery-pink flowers, up to four inches across, each a simple five-petaled saucer lit by a central boss of gold stamens. Where the true Cherokee rose blooms white, this one blooms in clear, soft pink, and opens early, in the first warm reach of spring, ahead of most roses.
Ruellia caroliniensis, the Carolina wild petunia, is a modest, long-blooming native that carries far more ecological weight than the quiet flowers suggest. From early summer into fall, a steady succession of lavender to violet-purple trumpets, each an inch or two across and lasting only a single day, opens along upright stems a foot or two high, replaced faithfully the next morning so that the plant is seldom out of bloom for months on end.
Salvia 'Anthony Parker' is a big, late-blooming hybrid sage with a charming South Carolina origin. The plant arose as a chance seedling in the Beaufort garden of the plantswoman Frances Parker, a cross between Salvia leucantha 'Midnight' and the pineapple sage Salvia elegans, and Frances rescued the young seedling from the path of the mower and named it for her grandson Anthony, then a year old, in 1994. From that lucky reprieve came one of the best late-season salvias for the South.
Sarcococca orientalis is a fragrant, uncommon sweet box from China, a compact evergreen of the boxwood family grown, like its kin, for a winter perfume far larger than the flowers that carry it. In late winter small white flowers open along the stems, modest to the eye but richly and sweetly scented, filling a still, mild day with fragrance and giving the shade garden a lift when little else stirs.
Royal catchfly wears the most electric red in the native flora. Silene regia sends up leafy, upright stems two to four feet tall, topped in mid to late summer with loose clusters of brilliant scarlet, star-shaped flowers, each with five deeply notched petals. Few prairie plants flower in true red, and fewer hold that color through the heat of July and August, which makes this native a genuine standout.
