Redvein enkianthus, Enkianthus campanulatus, is a refined deciduous shrub from the cool mountain woodlands of Japan, and the selection 'Rubrum' is the deepest-colored of the clan. In late spring the branches hang with dozens of small, waxy, bell-shaped flowers, but where the plain species opens in cream veined with pink, 'Rubrum' pours out flowers of rich, deep red, nodding in tidy clusters at the tips of each whorl of branches. Close up the bells look almost enameled; from a distance they veil the shrub in a soft red haze.
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.
The American beech is one of the great presences of the eastern woods, a large, slow-growing deciduous tree that ranges through rich forests from southern Canada to the Gulf. Toothed oval leaves, several inches long, emerge a clean bright green, turn clear yellow in fall and then a warm russet-brown, and cling to the branches through much of winter, a habit called marcescence that gives the bare woods a soft papery whisper. The trunk is the signature: smooth, silver-gray, and elephantine, so inviting that generations have carved their initials into the living bark, a temptation best resisted since the wounds never truly heal.
Figvine is very unlike the common edible fig (Ficus carica). This evergreen climber wears small, fingernail-sized rounded leaves and is most often seen scaling masonry walls, where a fringe of tiny aerial rootlets grips the roughest stone and brick. Given time, the creeping fig will trace a wall in intricate green patterns or blanket the surface entirely in a flat, dense sheet, one of the finest self-clinging covers for a shaded or partly shaded wall in a warm garden.
This striking, rather upright gardenia is a Woodlanders introduction that has since become more widely available, grown less for bloom than for the boldly marked leaves. Each glossy leaf is splashed and margined in strong yellow, so the whole shrub reads as a soft fountain of gold and green, a rare thing among broadleaf evergreens and a bright note for a shaded corner.
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.
Few flowers announce themselves the way white ginger lily does after dark. Through late summer and early fall, the tall leafy stems open dense terminal spikes of pure white flowers, each bloom shaped like a hovering butterfly with a small yellow-green stain at the throat, and each one throwing a rich, sweet perfume that carries across a warm garden in the evening air. The scent is jasmine-deep and unmistakable, the reason the flowers are gathered for perfume and personal adornment across the tropics.
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 coccineus 'Lone Star' is the pure white form of the scarlet rose mallow, and the change of color changes everything. Where the wild species blazes red, 'Lone Star' opens great five-pointed stars of clean, luminous white, five to seven inches across, glowing against deep green, finely cut foliage and all the more striking in the soft light of evening. The same tall, architectural native frame carries a cooler, more serene presence.
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'.
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, the sweetspires, are graceful shrubs of the family Iteaceae, named from the Greek word for willow after their willow-like leaves. Itea oldhamii is a little-known evergreen sweetspire from Taiwan, a compact shrub with an unusual party trick: the juvenile leaves can be holly-like, edged with small teeth, while the mature leaves settle to a smooth, entire margin. In late spring the plant carries racemes of small white flowers over glossy evergreen foliage.
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.
