Danae racemosa

Few plants carry their history as plainly as Danae racemosa. The name reaches back to Greek myth, to Danaë, daughter of the king of Argos, and the foliage carries a heavier classical freight than almost anything else you can grow in shade: Roman poet laureates are said to have worn it as their wreath, and Alexander the Great may have taken his victory crowns from it, cut from the same hills where he was fighting. Hence the two common names that have followed the plant for centuries, poet's laurel and Alexandrian laurel. It is, for the record, no true laurel at all.

What it is, botanically, is stranger and better. Danae is a monotypic genus, the only one of its kind, a monocot long filed among the lilies and now placed with the asparagus. The glossy, tapered "leaves" are not leaves but phylloclades, flattened stems doing a convincing impression of foliage. In spring the new growth comes up like asparagus or young bamboo, vertical canes rising from the crown that arch over as they lengthen into a soft, weeping fountain two to three feet tall and a little wider. The effect is fine-textured and deep green and holds every month of the year, which is rare enough in deep shade to feel like a small miracle.

The flowers are negligible by design, tiny and greenish, the kind you have to be told to look for. The fruit is the payoff: come autumn, they set bright red-orange berries that sit among the dark foliage and hold through winter, the whole reason florists have prized the cut stems for generations. Most of the commercial greenery, in fact, is grown in Italy and flown out weekly, which has saddled this Iranian native with the third name of Italian ruscus.

There is a reason you don't see them at every nursery. Danae grows slowly and resists propagation, taking five to seven years from seed to a plant worth selling, which is precisely how they became a treasured Southern pass-along, begged from a neighbor rather than bought. Give them shade, even deep shade, and ordinary well-drained soil; they ask for moisture to establish but shrug off drought once settled, and the deer leave them alone. Native to the woodlands of northern Iran and Asia Minor, hardy through roughly Zone 7, they bring a refinement to the dark corners of a garden that almost nothing else will, and a pedigree no other shade plant can touch.