Adina pilulifera

A medium-sized evergreen shrub still little known in cultivation, Adina pilulifera carries small, glossy leaves and, in midsummer, round white flower heads about an inch across, each bristling with protruding styles like a tiny Sputnik. The effect is curious and charming, a pincushion of white set among shining foliage, and the evergreen habit earns the shrub a place where the deciduous buttonbushes leave a winter gap.

Native from southern China and Taiwan to Japan, where the plant is called shui tuan hua, the water ball flower, for the rounded blooms held over wet ground. The deciduous relatives are better known: Adina rubella and the native buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis, both hardier and both beloved of pollinators. In southern Chinese folk medicine the leaves of this Adina have a minor tradition, chiefly for digestive complaints, though the shrub reaches Western gardens strictly as an ornamental.

For a warm, moist border or a pondside planting in zones 8 and 9, where the evergreen leaves and summer buttons earn a spot near water or in a mixed shrub planting. Give steady moisture, sun to part shade, and shelter from hard freezes at the cold edge of the range. An unusual evergreen for the collector and the wildlife gardener alike, the flowers drawing bees and butterflies.