Smooth hydrangea is a cherished shrub that has two check marks in its favor: ✔ it's a native hydrangea ✔ it's a slow colonizer We love plants that colonize an area. Colonizers do the work of filling in gaps for us, so we think down the road and give them...

You must have Florida Sunshine yellow anise-tree to brighten up your winter garden. The yellow leaves glow and pulsate with sunny cheer that's especially welcome during gray days and in grayed-out garden areas, but the yellow glow is a real mood-lifter 365 days a year.  Illicium parviflorum (small anise-tree) is the quintessential native...

Yellow buckeye, a giant flowering tree of the Appalachians, comes down the mountain and does just fine away from the other mountain folk (mountain trees, in this case). Stately, showy, native, and shady. If you have space to let it dominate and you want something a little different than typical...

We like Table Mountain willow-leaved sunflower because it's significantly more compact (1-2' tall) than the typical species (8' tall). This means you can actually see the flowers on Table Mountain because they're at knee-level rather than towering over you in the stratosphere. The little yellow sunflowers are prolific! The plant...

There's nothing like climbing aster and what it brings to the garden, being one of the treasured fall bloomers that are such a refreshing joy during the transition from sweltering summer to bleak brown winter.  The garden gets a second wind when this and other autumn flowering plants, like Helianthus salicifolius Table...

BananAppeal is half the size as other small anise-trees, forming a 3-4' tall by 3-4' wide, round shrub. So this one has a different shape, being a lower mound, rather than an upright-oval form like FLA Sunshine. Plus, BananAppeal's cheery yellow leaves resist bleaching caused by an abundance of sun. That's a strong asset because...

Bottlebrush buckeye is a captivating, native, and mammoth-sized shrub with tremendous white "bottlebrush" flowers. The flowers are perfectly named: bottlebrush buckeye aptly describes both the whiskery flowers and the buckeye-looking seeds. The compound palmate leaves, reminiscent of windmill palm fronds, are distinctive. You'll see this buckeye shrub in big parks or expanse...

We were fond of elderberry bushes when we'd float by them in a canoe - all in flower during summer paddles on Georgia rivers. Then we learned the dried berries can be steeped in vodka for a medicinal concoction and we had to plant a few for ourselves. We planted...

Colbalt-n-Gold Kalm St. Johnswort is a small, cheerful, decorative shrub. The small flowers cover the shrub in June and look good on top of the gray-green leaves. Everything about this plant is cute - the small stature, the button-like flowers (albeit the showy yellow stamens would make them spiky awkward...

I'm getting into native shrubs more than ever before, so we planted our first red chokeberries at our new home. I've seen Aronia species forming nice thickets in other's gardens, but it recently hit that I have to have some now too. We're starting with Aronia arbutifolia 'Brilliant' and will...

Since the day I saw a fistful of red winter stems of this silky dogwood at Dr. Dirr's I had to have it. Dirr found Cayenne growing in a swamp in Virginia and brought twigs home to propagate. I'm sure glad he did - I've long coveted the red stems...

This is another of my paddle-by plants. I see it a ton from a canoe on a river. It's in native gardens too and here and there you'll see it as a surprise in regular gardens. It stands out because it flowers in the summer heat and those flowers. They...

Sweetshrub is a favorite native plant; the flowers being unlike no other. Variety purpureus is special due to leaf backs maturing rich purple. On Calycanthus floridus variety purpureus, the leaf uppersides are darker green than the species and other types. We like it for that reason too - the color variation amongst...