Top 10 plants for Southern gardeners

A patch of pure white dogwood blossoms.

Like many of you, some of our most popular landscape plants originated elsewhere. Yet they are not newcomers to the region, having settled down in the Piedmont and proved their value over the decades.

So well have these immigrant plants become our own that you might be surprised that they arose first in such distant places as China, Japan and Korea. Brought to America, most within the past two centuries, propagated and hybridized, these stellar shrubs and trees found their way into our landscapes where they are stars of the show.

And what a show it is. No place beats Charlotte and the Piedmont for spring beauty when thousands and thousands of azaleas, camellias and dogwood trees bloom magnificently. Of this trio, only the flowering dogwood is a native plant, but evergreen azaleas and camellias are so well-suited to our soil and climate, they've been planted by the thousands. And with careful selection of varieties, you can have camellias in bloom from November through March. Less widely planted is winter daphne, a small evergreen from China that bears flowers of intense fragrance in early March. Chinese loropetalum is among the newer of the popular landscape plants, having made its mark in just the past two decades with its spring flowers and graceful form.

Gardenias, loved for their distinctive fragrance, and crape myrtles, for their graceful shape and long season of summer flowers, rank among the important plants of the South since their arrival from Asia. Until the proliferation of crape myrtles, sometimes called the Southern lilac, in the past 25 years, Charlotte was a greener, less colorful place in the summer.

And it won't take you long to notice three kinds of important trees in the landscape. The native willow oak arose on our riverbanks and forests but has found a new home along the older streets of Charlotte. Just as willow oak is Charlotte's signature tree, the Southern magnolia is the South's signature tree. This native tree grows large across the South, its broad evergreen leaves and large, fragrant white flowers dominating any landscape.

The final selection in my top 10 is Nellie R. Stevens holly, a large holly that grows splendidly in the South. This marvelous hybrid resulted from the cross of English and Chinese hollies, and it was made in America.

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