Lindera fragrans

Lindera fragrans is an evergreen shrub or small tree carrying glossy, leathery, narrowly lance-shaped leaves that look more like bamboo than like anything in the laurel family, each one marked with three clear veins running the length of the blade. The effect is light and linear where most broadleaf evergreens are heavy, and the foliage alone is worth the space. Growth is upright to around twelve or fifteen feet with a narrow six-foot spread, and the bark is a quiet yellow-brown.

This plant came to us through the Arnold Arboretum, and so far as we know Woodlanders is probably the first nursery in the United States to have offered the species. The shrub has grown well here in Aiken, South Carolina, in a semi-shaded site with well-drained soil, which is the only cultivation record most American gardeners have to go on. Native to southern China at elevations between roughly seven hundred and two thousand meters, Lindera fragrans remains almost unknown in cultivation on this side of the Atlantic.

Lindera belongs to Lauraceae, the laurel family, in the company of sassafras, bay, avocado and cinnamon, and the family trait is aromatic tissue: crush a leaf or scratch a twig and the spice comes up at once, which is where every spicebush gets the common name. The genus honors Johann Linder, an eighteenth-century Swedish botanist. Like the rest of the genus this species is dioecious, male and female flowers on separate plants, and the flowers themselves are small, yellow and petalless, opening in spring with a fragrance the epithet promises. Female plants follow with small drupes that ripen from blue-green to purple-black in early autumn. The Chinese spicebushes have a long history in traditional medicine, but that tradition attaches to other species in the genus and we make no medicinal claim for this one.

Give Lindera fragrans the conditions that have worked here: semi-shade, well-drained soil with organic matter, and shelter from hard winter wind, which will burn evergreen foliage faster than cold alone. Use the narrow upright habit where a tall evergreen is wanted in a tight space, at a woodland edge, or as a foliage counterpoint among camellias, mahonias and ferns. Hardy through USDA zones 8 to 9, and one honest caution comes with a plant this little grown: the hardiness limits are an estimate from a small sample rather than a settled figure, so anyone gardening at the cold edge is experimenting alongside us. For the collector, that is most of the appeal.