Sebastiania schottiana

Some plants arrive with a pedigree, and some arrive with a person. This one came to us from Ken Wurdack, a botanist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and his work centers on the systematics and evolution of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. He's the sort of botanist who describes entirely new genera in the tribe Hippomaneae, which happens to be the exact tribe Sebastiania sits in. So this is a spurge handed over by a man who names spurges for a living, which is about the best reference a euphorb could ask for.

At home they're called sarandi. Across southern Brazil they line the margins of rivers and lagoons, ranging south to Uruguay and northeastern Argentina, a riverbank shrub built for water that rises and falls and sometimes closes overhead entirely. The leaves are narrow and willow-fine, carried along slender branches that lean with a current rather than break against it. Older names like angustifolia and hippophaifolia all circle the same idea: something thin, soft, and quietly elegant. The flowers and fruit are modest, the way the spurge family usually is when it isn't busy being a poinsettia.

We'll be straight with you. There is very little written about this plant. What exists is mostly herbarium sheets and Brazilian field records, almost nothing in the way of garden experience, and certainly no one telling us how a sarandi spends a South Carolina summer. Our own stock is still small, young plants finding their feet, so for the moment most of what we can offer you is the imagining: a fine green veil leaning over water, a pond margin softened, a low hedge that moves when the wind does. Whether they'll take to a Carolina pond or sulk through our winters, we honestly don't yet know.

Which is the whole appeal. A plant with a real story, a serious provenance, and a nearly blank page where the growing notes ought to be. Someone gets to write the first chapter. It might as well be you.