The garden's backbone: flowering trees, native and rare shrubs, and evergreens that hold their shape through every season. Many are Southeastern natives; others are quiet collector's plants you won't find at a big-box nursery, chosen for resilience and lasting, year-round interest.
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
This is the tea plant. Not a tea plant but the tea plant. Every cup of green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong, and pu-erh on Earth comes from a single species, Camellia sinensis. The differences in flavor and color come from the timing of the harvest and the way the leaves are handled afterward: green tea from the youngest leaves, briefly steamed; white tea from the unopened buds; black tea from fully oxidized older leaves; oolong from partial oxidation. One plant, many fates.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
A native of China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and parts of South Asia, Clerodendrum trichotomum has been cultivated in Western gardens since the mid-1800s, when the shrub was introduced from Japan and quickly adopted across Europe and the American South for uncanny late-season performance. This is the hardiest member of the genus and, for our money, the most theatrical.
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.
Golden dewdrop, Duranta erecta, is a member of the verbena family grown across the warm world for two ornaments the shrub carries at once: loose, drooping sprays of soft lilac-blue flowers, each with a darker eye, and long chains of round, glossy amber berries that hang like strings of wet gold. The common name catches that second gift exactly, while older names, pigeon berry and skyflower, catch the first. Native from Mexico and the Caribbean through much of tropical South America, the shrub has been carried into gardens throughout the subtropics, where the plant flowers and fruits nearly year round.
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.
Heimia salicifolia is an airy, fine-textured shrub that carries a surprising amount of history in a modest frame. Slender willow-like leaves clothe the arching stems, and from midsummer into fall small, bright yellow, five-petaled flowers open in the leaf axils all along the branches, each followed by a little dry seed capsule. The overall effect is light and gauzy, a soft yellow haze rather than a bold splash, and the plant grows fast and multi-branched into a rounded, four-to-eight-foot mound.
Juglans nigra, the eastern black walnut, is one of the great trees of eastern North America, a towering, long-lived hardwood native from the Appalachians and Midwest to the Mississippi Valley, most at home in deep, rich, moist but well-drained soils along river bottoms and fertile uplands. Large pinnate leaves cast a broad, airy shade in summer, leaf out late in spring, and drop early in fall to a soft gold, making way for the tree's most famous gift, the crop of hard-shelled nuts.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
50–80 ft.
Spread
40–60 ft.
Bloom
Green
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
topical applications, digestive health, detoxification & cleansing, general wellness
Spicebush is the shrub that tells you the ground is good. Early land surveyors in the eastern states used Lindera benzoin as an indicator of rich agricultural soil, and the rule holds in the garden: where spicebush thrives, most things will. The plant is a common understory shrub of moist, rich woods from Ontario to Florida and west to Texas, growing six to twelve feet in a loose rounded mass, often colonial from root sprouts, and every part smells of citrus and pepper when bruised.
This quietly handsome evergreen has grown well for years in the Woodlanders garden here in Aiken, South Carolina, holding a place in semi-shade where many broadleaf evergreens sulk. The spicebush earns a spot on foliage alone: glossy, leathery leaves, roughly heart-shaped and about three inches across, each marked by three bold veins, with new growth flushing a soft bronze before deepening to green.
Hardiness
Zones 8–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
6–10 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, pain relief, reproductive health
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
Persea borbonia, the redbay, is a handsome broadleaf evergreen native to the southeastern United States, ranging from coastal Virginia through Florida and west along the Gulf. A member of the laurel family and a close relative of the avocado, the redbay carries the same aromatic oils, and the glossy leaves have long been used in the southern kitchen much as bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) is, to season soups, stews, and gumbo.
Pseudolarix kaempferi, better known by the synonym Pseudolarix amabilis and the common name golden larch, is a rare, slow-growing deciduous conifer native to eastern China. Despite the name, the golden larch is not a true larch but the sole member of its own genus, Pseudolarix, prized for a graceful broad-pyramidal form, soft texture, and a brilliant golden fall color that rivals any maple or ginkgo.
These are the grandchildren of a legend. The Wye Oak of Wye Mills, Maryland, was the greatest white oak in the country, a single tree that stood more than four hundred and sixty years and served as Maryland's state tree until a storm finally brought the giant down in 2002. Quercus alba 'Grandchildren of Wye Oak' are seedling-grown descendants of that famous tree, carrying the bloodline of an American icon into gardens that have room for the long view.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
60–80 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
Smooth sumac is a bold, colony-forming native shrub of the eastern and central United States, in time reaching the scale of a small tree, and one of the finest plants going for a hot, dry, sunny site where little else will thrive. The long, pinnately compound leaves give an almost tropical texture through summer, and the plant spreads by root suckers into broad, picturesque colonies, or can be held to a single tree-like specimen where the suckers are controlled.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun
Height
9–15 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Staghorn sumac is a bold native shrub or small tree of the northeastern United States and Canada, growing fifteen to thirty feet on stout, forking stems clothed in fine velvety hairs, the texture and antler-like branching that give the plant the name. The big, pinnate leaves are bright green through summer and turn a spectacular blend of yellow, orange, and red in fall, one of the great autumn shrubs of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–30 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Rosemary is a timeless classic in both the garden and the kitchen, an aromatic evergreen shrub of the sun-baked Mediterranean coast, so distinctive that botanists long kept rosemary in a genus apart, Rosmarinus officinalis, before recent study moved the herb into the sages as Salvia rosmarinus. The old genus name means dew of the sea, for the plant's love of bright, salt-swept coastal hillsides. Slender, needle-like, deep green leaves clothe the woody stems the year round, and soft blue flowers open along them from winter into spring.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
Salix chaenomeloides, the Japanese pussy willow, is a fast-growing shrub or small tree native to Japan, Korea, and parts of China, long valued in East Asian gardens for the show the plant makes in the depths of winter. Well before the leaves break, the bare branches set fat, silvery-white catkins with a soft, velvety nap, the largest and most striking of any pussy willow, and the branches are cut by the armful for early-spring arrangements.
The willows gave the world its first painkiller. Willow bark, steeped by Greek and Native American healers alike for fever and ache, carries salicin, the compound nineteenth-century chemists refined into salicylic acid and, in time, aspirin, which still wears the genus name buried in the chemistry. This particular willow comes by a quieter trade. Salix koriyanagi is the Korean basket willow, the name meaning just that, long grown across Korea, Japan, and China for slender rods woven into baskets and furniture by hands that wanted something straight, supple, and strong.
This plant is a botanical time machine. Sarcandra glabra belongs to the Chloranthaceae, a flowering-plant family with only four surviving genera worldwide and a fossil record reaching back into the Early Cretaceous, more than a hundred million years ago. Pollen and floral fossils of the Chloranthaceae are among the earliest evidence of flowering plants anywhere on Earth, and the family was already abundant when the dinosaurs were only in their middle age. Today Sarcandra is one of just four genera left from a lineage that once spread across what is now Portugal, Spain, and eastern North America, and most of that Cretaceous diversity is gone. The little plant in the garden is a quiet survivor of a family that mostly did not make it.
