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 red buckeye is the South's hummingbird herald, a clump-forming, round-topped deciduous shrub or small tree whose lustrous, palmately compound leaves break very early, often before the last frosts, and whose six-inch panicles of tubular scarlet-red flowers open in spring just as the ruby-throated hummingbirds return north. The bright bloom, unusual among the buckeyes, draws hummingbirds and bees in numbers and gives the plant a long place in the affection of native-plant gardeners across the southern United States.
Korean mountain ash is the unusual member of the clan, a deciduous tree from Korea, recently moved by botanists from Sorbus into the genus Alniaria, with simple, finely toothed, alder-like leaves rather than the compound leaves of the familiar mountain ashes. White flower clusters open in May, and the fall foliage turns warm shades of orange and red.
Sweet almond verbena is grown for one glorious thing above all: scent. From midsummer until hard frost, Aloysia virgata tips every branch with slender spikes of small white flowers that pour out an intoxicating vanilla-almond fragrance, strongest in the late afternoon and evening and carrying clear across a garden. Butterflies and hummingbirds work the spikes all season.
Among the rarest of the serviceberries, Amelanchier nantucketensis is a low, thicket-forming shrub that Eugene Bicknell first described in 1911 from the sandplains of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island whose name the plant carries. Nantucket serviceberry belongs to a small, taxonomically slippery group within the rose family, so closely tangled with neighboring shadbushes that botanists have argued for more than a century over whether this is a true species or a stabilized hybrid. What sets the plant apart is disarmingly small: petals shorter than those of any other serviceberry in the Northeast, often dusted with pollen along their own margins, a quirk called andropetaly that appears nowhere else in the group.
Coastal serviceberry is the compact, low-growing member of a beloved native clan, a small deciduous shrub of the Atlantic coastal plain that spreads gently into colonies and opens clouds of white, five-petaled flowers in early spring, among the first shrubs to bloom as the woods wake.
Amelanchier x grandiflora is the apple serviceberry, a naturally occurring cross between two eastern natives, the downy serviceberry and the smooth Allegheny serviceberry, and 'Autumn Brilliance' is the selection that made the group famous. The Illinois nurseryman Willet Wandell found this seedling in his Urbana nursery and introduced the plant to gardens in 1986 under U.S. Plant Patent 5,717, choosing the seedling above all for the blaze of autumn color behind the name. Decades on, 'Autumn Brilliance' remains the most widely planted serviceberry in the trade, prized for a vigorous, gracefully branched frame and reliable good looks in every season.
Apple serviceberry, Amelanchier x grandiflora, is the graceful natural hybrid of two eastern native serviceberries, the downy and the smooth Allegheny, and 'Princess Diana' is among the loveliest selections of the group. The plant appeared in a cultivated garden in Elm Grove, Wisconsin in the mid-1980s and was granted U.S. Plant Patent 6,041 in 1987, chosen for a wide, gracefully spreading canopy, generous white bloom, and fall color that arrives early and holds late. Where many serviceberries grow stiffly upright, 'Princess Diana' reaches outward, a small tree with the airy, layered poise the name suggests.
Smooth false indigo is a rare deciduous shrub of sandy southern streambanks, carrying pinnate, compound leaves whose leaflets are notably large and rounded, a softer, more luxuriant texture than the ferny foliage of the common false indigos. In early summer the branch tips raise slender spikes of tiny blue to purple flowers, each lit with the bright orange anthers typical of the genus.
Flame acanthus, better known as hummingbird bush, is a tough, airy deciduous shrub for hot, dry places, hung from late spring until frost with slender orange to red tubular flowers that ruby-throated hummingbirds cannot resist. Small, pointed leaves give a light, open texture, and the long bloom season makes Anisacanthus wrightii one of the best hummingbird plants for the southern garden.
A pumpkin-orange selection of the classic flame acanthus, Anisacanthus wrightii 'Pumpkin' trades the usual scarlet for warm, glowing orange, lighting the late-season garden with the same slender, tubular, hummingbird flowers. The clone was discovered at the San Antonio Botanic Garden and is generally taken to be the selection known as 'Pumpkin'.
The strawberry tree is a handsome broadleaf evergreen, a large shrub or small tree hung in fall and early winter with clusters of nodding, urn-shaped, pinkish-white flowers, just as the previous year's fruit ripens to warty, orange-red, strawberry-like globes. Flowers and fruit on the branches at once is the particular charm of Arbutus unedo, and the glossy leaves and shredding cinnamon bark hold interest year round.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, digestive health, heart support
A hybrid strawberry tree, Arbutus x andrachnoides crosses the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, with the Grecian strawberry tree, A. andrachne, and takes the best of both: white, bell-shaped flowers and pink, strawberry-like fruit on a small evergreen tree, over dark green leaves an inch and a half to four inches long. The real prize comes with age, when the bark peels away to a smooth, rich red-brown that rivals any madrone.
Aronia arbutifolia has grown in the wet woods and pocosins of the eastern United States for a very long time, largely unbothered by the horticultural world's attention. 'Brilliantissima' changed that. Selected for foliage with a deeper gloss and berries of a more saturated, almost lacquered red than the straight species, this is the form that finally made gardeners look twice at a native shrub long overlooked despite centuries of quiet usefulness.
Asimina obovata is the bigflower pawpaw, a Florida native that carries the largest, showiest blooms in a genus better known for its fruit. The pawpaws are the temperate outliers of the Annonaceae, the custard apple family whose tropical members include the cherimoya, soursop, and ylang-ylang, and Asimina alone among them ventures north into the sandy uplands of the American Southeast. The genus name descends from an early Native American word for the fruit, carried into English through the French asiminier, while obovata describes the egg-shaped leaves, broadest above the middle.
Baccharis halimifolia is a plant of edges and thresholds, growing where the land loosens and blurs into water: salt marsh margins, ditches, tidal creeks, and back dunes. In fall, when most things are shutting down, the groundsel bush erupts into a soft storm of white seed fluff, like a marsh firework frozen mid-explosion. This is the shrub that coastal Louisiana calls manglier, that botanists call groundsel bush or eastern baccharis, and that local healers have quietly trusted for generations.
Hardiness
Zones 6–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
8–10 ft.
Spread
5–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, immune support, detoxification & cleansing, general wellness
Bejaria racemosa, the tarflower, is one of the odd and lovely surprises of the Florida scrub, a heath-family shrub that looks nothing like the rest of the clan. Where blueberries and azaleas carry small, fused, bell-shaped blooms, tarflower opens wide flowers of seven separate petals, white to soft pink and sweetly fragrant, held in loose summer racemes. The genus honors the eighteenth-century Spanish botanist Jose Bejar, and though older books spell the name Befaria, botanists have since settled on Bejaria.
Bouvardia ternifolia, the firecracker bush, is a compact, heat-loving shrub of the southwestern United States and Mexico, hung from late spring to frost with clusters of long, slender, scarlet-red tubular flowers. Few plants pull hummingbirds in like this one: the bright tubes are pitched exactly for their bills, and the bloom keeps coming through the hottest months when little else holds color.
Buddleia alternifolia, the fountain or alternate-leaf butterfly bush, stands apart from the usual butterfly-bush crowd. A deciduous shrub native to northwestern China, the fountain butterfly bush is the most cold-hardy of the genus, and is grown above all for a weeping form and an early-season flood of fragrant, lavender-purple bloom.
Buddleia cordata ssp. tomentella is a striking, large evergreen shrub with broad, somewhat heart-shaped leaves in soft gray-green, the lighter undersides flashing in every breeze. First collected by Yucca-Do Nursery near Los Lerios in Coahuila, Mexico, the plant was originally offered by Woodlanders as Buddleia sp. 'Los Lerios', and the true identity was later confirmed by Dr. Jon Lindstrom of the University of Arkansas, a longtime customer and plantsman of note.
Buddleia lindleyana, Lindley's butterfly bush, is the elegant outlier of the genus, an open, arching shrub from China hung in summer with long, slender, gracefully curved racemes of purple-violet flowers. Where most butterfly bushes carry stiff cone-shaped panicles, this one drapes, the curving spikes nodding from the tips of the branches from June until frost.
