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...

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 a climbing aster and what it brings to the garden, being one of the treasured late-summer to early fall bloomers that are such a relief at the end of a hot summer. It's like the garden gets a second wind when this and Helianthus Table Mountain start...

You must have Florida Sunshine small anise-tree if you struggle with feeling gloomy in winter. 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. Small anise-tree is the quintessential...

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 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...

Red buckeye is a feast for the eyes when in flower and the parent tree of these seedlings has flowers that are a TRUE deep red (we mention this because we read that sometimes the tree flowers greenish, though we've never seen that). Can you name many another native southeastern...

We explained under the FLA Sunshine type why yellow-leaved anise-trees are important denizens for a garden, so we won't go into that here. What we want you to know about BananAppeal is that it's half the size as others, forming a 3-4' tall by 3-4' wide, round shrub. So this...

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...