About 2005 I went to a native plant nursery in southeast Pennsylvania and bought a potted straight species of the Virginia Sweetspire, not a cultivar. I earlier had bought a 'Henry's Garnet' Sweetspire at the conventional nursery where I had worked and had it planted farther back in the backyard not far away. The most popular cultivar bears longer flower spikes, has longer, narrower leaves, and develops a brighter red fall color a little later. I still love the mother species. The species is native from New Jersey and a spot in southcentral Pennsylvania down to southern Florida to east Texas & southeast Oklahoma up into southern Illinois, growing in bogs, swamps, dunes, barrens, and along creeks and streams; and can be found growing in shallow water. It is a clean, neat shrub with smooth green to reddish-purple twigs and many slender erect or upright stems with red-brown to gray bark. The 2 to 6 inch long white spikes are very fragrant in late June and July. It has small dry brown capsule fruits in late summer through winter that can be eaten by birds and small mammals. It has a shallow, lateral root system and is easy to transplant. A few cultivars are sold at many garden centers and nurseries in the mid-Atlantic and the South; some in the Midwest.

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