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 tung oil tree is a handsome medium-sized deciduous tree, broad and spreading, with large heart-shaped to lobed leaves up to ten inches across and showy panicles of white flowers, blushed pink and orange at the throat, that open in spring before or with the new foliage. Few flowering trees of the Deep South make a fuller spring show.
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.
There is a strange romance buried in this plant's history, and 'Golden King' sits on the male side of it. Aucuba japonica reached England in 1783 as a single female, the yellow-flecked gold dust shrub that Victorians went on to plant by the thousand. Aucuba carry their sexes on separate plants, and for eighty years every aucuba in the country was a clone of that one female, waiting on the famous red berries that never came, because Japan had sealed its borders and no male could be had.
There is a book about Aucuba japonica called A Virgin for Eighty Years, which sounds like a romance novel and is, instead, one of the strangest stories in horticulture. The species arrived in England in 1783 as a single female plant. Aucuba is dioecious, male and female flowers on separate plants, so for the next eighty years every aucuba in English gardens was a clone of that one original female. Gardeners knew the plant was meant to bear bright red berries, since reports came back from Japan, but Japan had closed its borders, no male could be had, and they simply waited.
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.
Buddleia davidii 'Attraction' is a more compact butterfly bush than the usual run of the species, forming a rounded shrub of arching branches lined with gray-green leaves. From summer into fall, royal red, fragrant flowers gather in nodding panicles six to ten inches long, drawing butterflies and bees in profusion.
'Lochinch' is one of the most refined of the butterfly bushes, a cross of Buddleia davidii and the silvery Buddleia fallowiana that takes the best of both: dense, fragrant panicles of soft lavender-blue, each tiny flower lit by a small orange eye, over handsome gray-green, almost silver foliage. Compact and rounded, the shrub blooms all summer into fall on the new growth.
'Miss Ruby' is the butterfly bush that finally cracked the color barrier: a striking, near-sterile hybrid of Buddleia davidii and Buddleia globosa carrying racemes of bright, purplish pink, a magenta few other butterfly bushes can touch. The shrub was bred by Dr. Dennis Werner at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina, the source of our cuttings.
Endemic to the mountain scrub of Madagascar, where the plant scrambles along slopes between two and six thousand feet, Buddleja madagascariensis throws out long arching canes that will climb to ten feet given a wall to lean on. The flowers come in late winter and spring on terminal panicles up to ten inches long, opening deep yellow and aging through orange to soft pink along the same spike, all of it carrying a honeyed fragrance strong enough to scent a courtyard. The leaves are narrowly ovate, dark green above, silvery and felted beneath, so the whole shrub seems to flicker when wind moves through the canes.
A small boxwood with narrow, bright green leaves and an unusually showy spring bloom, this is apparently the true Buxus harlandii. The boxwoods commonly sold in the South as B. harlandii, including the variety 'Richard', are, according to Dr. Todd Lasseigne, another Asian species, Buxus bodinieri; the real harlandii is much less often seen.
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.
The white-fruited form of the Asian beautyberry, Callicarpa dichotoma 'Albifructus' is a quiet pleasure of the late-summer border: instead of the usual magenta, the arching stems hang with luminous, ivory-white berries in elegant clusters, cool and refined where the purple kinds are bold. Native to eastern Asia, in Korea, China, and Japan, the white beautyberry is smaller and more graceful than the American species, and all the more striking for the restraint.
Callicarpa dichotoma 'Issai', the purple beautyberry, is a compact, cold-hardy selection grown for a heavy crop of glossy, violet-purple berries that ring the stems from late summer well into fall. Smaller and tidier than the American beautyberry, 'Issai' fruits young and freely, often setting berries on a single plant, and holds the color long after the leaves have gone.
This is a Woodlanders plant in the most literal sense: selected, named, and introduced to the American nursery trade by this nursery, in this town, decades ago. The cultivar now carries our name across the country. One Green World in Oregon, Cistus on Sauvie Island, Greenleaf as a national wholesaler, Wilson Bros in three-gallon, Cloud Mountain Farm in Washington, Dancing Oaks in the Willamette Valley, and dozens of regional nurseries from Louisiana to Idaho all carry the plant. Few cultivars in American horticulture are so permanently tied to a single small nursery in Aiken, South Carolina. To buy here is to buy at the source.
Calluna vulgaris 'Gold Haze' is a heather grown as much for foliage as for flower: tight, upright sprays of bright golden growth that hold their color through the year and warm to a deeper gold in winter cold. Set in drifts, the plants knit into a low, even evergreen carpet.
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.
Born of careful hands and watchful eyes at the JC Raulston Arboretum in North Carolina, Calycanthus × raulstonii 'Hartlage Wine' is a sweetshrub of uncommon grace. Richard Hartlage made the cross as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in 1991, pairing the Southern native Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus) with the refined Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis); the seedling first flowered in 1996, and the hybrid name honors J.C. Raulston, the arboretum's late director.
Bred by Les Jury in New Plymouth, New Zealand, first flowered in 1971 and registered in 1976, 'Jury's Yellow' is the camellia that finally cracked the yellow code, or came as close as Western breeders could get before the Chinese yellow species (Camellia nitidissima) made the leap from botanical archive to nursery bench. Jury worked only with white japonicas, betting that the gold of the stamens could be coaxed to bleed into the petaloids at a flower's center. The bet paid off. The result is an anemone-form bloom, nine clean white petals cupped around a thick boss of cream-yellow petaloids, the color of fresh butter rather than crayon yellow.
