I love this article written by Bill Fontenot about Cyrilla racemiflora. It is from the Nature Dude Blog dated December 2017. I considered pulling a few quotes for my article, but when I read it again, I decided to post the whole thing, because it covers everything I wanted to talk about, in Billspeak, which is as entertaining as it is informative. With Bill's permission:
"Based on winter foliage display alone, I always reserve a post about swamp cyrilla (Cyrilla racemiflora; aka titi bush); that, and this plant's high level of adaptability to various garden soils throughout the southeastern U.S. In the wild, it is an inhabitant of moist to wet sandy-acidic soils around baygalls, streams, and blackwater swamps -- places where you'd also expect river birch, tag alder, wild pink azalea, Viburnum nudum to live. Turns out, like river birch, cyrilla likes loamy soils as well -- any sort of loam (clay-loam, sandy-loam, silt-loam, loam), and even tolerates circum-neutral non-loamy sands and clays! Our place, for example possesses a decidedly circumneutral pH of 6.85 and is comprised of a decidedly non-loamy black silty-clay. Presently, three swamp cyrillas and one little-leaf cyrilla (Cyrilla parvafolia) live here -- two of which are at least 30 years old. So it's a wild gardeners dream -- much like American beautyberry and arrowwood viburnum in that regard.
I've never seen birds or mammals eating its seeds, but I have seen songbirds hunting through it on a regular basis. The coolest features about this plant are bloom and foliage. Blooms are extra showy and appear in June, when relatively few other native shrubs (except for American beautyberry!) are blooming. Over the summer the blooms persist, gradually morphing into golden-yellow racemes of seeds and then brown when fully ripened at the end of the summer.
Leaves are glossy/showy, and in winter about two-thirds of them slowly turn various hues of yellows and reds, with the remaining one-third remaining green. So what we end up with (design-wise) is a big shrub to small tree with a bodacious early summer bloom habit followed by an eye-catching confetti-like winter foliage display."
Cyrillas are hard to find in local retail nurseries, but ANPP has some of these beauties in 3 gallon containers left over from the sale, so come get them before they are gone. You can read and learn more about Bill's knowledge of landscaping with native plants in his book, Native Gardening in the South. The second edition is available from ANPP and the third edition is coming soon. -Dona Weifenbach
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