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.
In July, when most of the shade garden has settled into a holding pattern of foliage and waiting, Aesculus parviflora opens for business. The timing is the first surprise. The flowers are the second. Each panicle is a foot or more of tightly packed white tubular blooms with conspicuous pink-red anthers projecting beyond the petals, the whole spike held upright above the foliage like something assembled by a botanical committee that could not decide between elegant and extravagant and chose both. A mature colony in full bloom in midsummer is among the more spectacular events available to the shade gardener, and the hummingbirds and swallowtails arrive reliably.
The pawpaw is a small, tropical-looking deciduous tree with large, drooping leaves and the largest edible fruit native to this country. In mid to late summer the green, mango-shaped fruit softens to a fragrant custard, banana and mango in one, around rows of big dark seeds, relished by people and raccoons alike. The crushed leaves carry a distinctive odor, and the whole tree reads more like the tropics than a temperate woodland.
A rare, semi-evergreen shrub, Baccharis dioica resembles the common groundsel bush, Baccharis halimifolia, but is quite distinct. In 1979, just before Hurricane Frederic did tremendous damage to the Mobile, Alabama area, we found this plant growing behind the dunes on Dauphin Island.
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
Everyone who grows the native beautyberry knows the plant by the autumn display: those improbable whorls of magenta-purple fruit circling every stem like something a florist arranged and forgot to bill for. 'Welch's Pink' is that plant, in a color the species was not supposed to have.
Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
Clethra alnifolia, the summersweet or sweet pepperbush, is a deciduous native of the eastern United States, at home along pond edges, in damp woods, and at the margins of coastal swamps from Maine to Florida. The species spreads gently by suckers into colonies of upright stems, and earns the name sweet pepperbush from the small, peppercorn-like seed capsules that follow the flowers and hang on through winter. For all that, the summer flowers are the reason to grow them: erect bottlebrush spikes, intensely honey-scented, that open over many weeks in the heat of July and August when little else in the shrub border is in bloom.
Clinopodium georgianum is a low, aromatic shrublet of the mint family, prized for highly scented foliage and clouds of pinkish-lavender flowers in late summer and fall, when much of the garden is winding down. Georgia savory makes a fine edging or front-of-border plant for sunny or lightly shaded spots with good drainage, and unlike most of the tribe, this southern native will grow in heavier soils as well as sand.
Conradina canescens 'Gray Mound' is a silver-leaved selection of the false rosemary that grows wild on the deep, pine-fringed sands of the northern Gulf Coast, in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle, where the species once mingled with sea oats and longleaf pine. A member of the mint family, this aromatic shrub carries soft, needle-like foliage in a ghostly silver-gray, and from spring into early summer, sometimes again in the cool of fall, offers a flush of pale lavender to bluish, two-lipped flowers that native bees and butterflies work eagerly.
This is a tree you harvest from a boat. Crataegus opaca, the western mayhaw, grows wild in the flooded bottoms of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the cypress sloughs and pond margins of east Texas, Louisiana, and the Deep South, and when their fruit ripens in late spring it drops straight into the water and floats. For generations Southern families went out in May with boats, nets, and scoops to gather the bobbing red haws off the surface, a fast three weeks of work that turned into a year's worth of jelly. The name says as much: mayhaw, for the month, and haw, the old word for hawthorn.
Few plants carry a story like the Franklin tree. Collected from the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia by John and William Bartram in the 1760s and named by them for their friend Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia alatamaha was last seen growing wild around 1803 and has never been found in nature since. Every Franklinia alive today, in every garden and arboretum on earth, descends from the seed the Bartrams carried home to Philadelphia. To grow one is to hold a living piece of that lineage.
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.
Hypericum nudiflorum is the early riser among the St. John's Worts, a slender, upright shrub that opens golden flowers as early as May, often a full month ahead of relatives. The blooms carry the many-stamened brush typical of the clan, set against broad, light green, oval leaves that give the plant a softer, leafier look than the needle-leaved species.
Hypericum reductum is the ground-hugging member of the family, a low, heathery evergreen that mounds and mats rather than climbing, rarely rising much above the knee. The stems are crowded with fine, needle-like, deep green leaves that give an almost coniferous texture, and through late spring and summer the whole low sweep is dotted with small, bright yellow, star-shaped flowers full of stamens.
Ilex glabra 'Leucocarpa' is the white-berried surprise among the inkberries, a native evergreen holly that trades the usual near-black fruit for berries of clean ivory white. On the ordinary inkberry the dark berries all but vanish against the deep green leaves, but here the pale fruit stands out cleanly and holds on the branches from fall right through to spring, a quiet, unexpected show in the winter garden.
Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite' is winterberry shrunk to garden size and cranked up in intensity. Where much of the landscape fades to gray, this compact native holly turns into a beacon, the bare stems packed with heavy clusters of large, glossy scarlet berries that color in fall and cling deep into winter, a living ember at the pond's edge or against fresh snow.
Every winterberry covered in red is hiding a secret, and his name is 'Southern Gentleman'. Winterberry hollies are dioecious, male and female on separate plants, and only the pollinated females set the blazing red fruit the species is grown for. No male nearby, no berries. 'Southern Gentleman' is the male who makes the show possible, and asks for none of the credit.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands, familiar in gardens for fragrant white flower spikes and fiery fall color. 'Shirley's Compact,' sometimes called Shirley's Midget, takes the species to an extreme: a true miniature, a dense little bun of a plant with tiny, twisted, inch-long leaves, growing so slowly that a ten-year-old clump may stand only a foot or a foot and a half tall while spreading two or three feet wide.
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.
