Sunlight Gardens: "If you've ever seen thicket of TiTi along streams or swamps of the southeast, you had to have been taken back by the wonderful fragrance of the late spring-early summer flowers, or the gorgeous red or orange fall leaf color, or the beautiful, irregular, twisting, contorted branching patterns. This is truly a shrub for all seasons. Growing in moist or wet places in the southeast, TiTi is a small, graceful tree or shrub (10-15 feet tall) with a rounded shape. Its creamy white flowers are in 3 to 6 inch long drooping clusters. Bees love them and the honey of TiTi is harvested commercially. In the south, it holds its deep green leaves all winter but loses them further north. ;;Or for something unusual, use TiTi as a native alternative to Japanese maple. Its low, twisting, contorted branches resemble the ornamental shapes of these dwarf maples. Plus its bark is very attractive in the winter when the leaves are gone. Imagine it at the top of a low wall. TiTi is a lovely and unusual tree for a bright place with average to moist soil."

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This is a new plant species to me, as I have only seen a few at Jenkins Arboretum in southeast Pennsylvania. Its native range is from east Texas along the Gulf coast to central Florida and up the Atlantic coastal plain into southeast Virginia in bogs, swamps, bottomlands, stream banks, limestone sinks, high sandy exposed ridges, and dunes. It favours draining wet to moist soils, but tolerates dry soils in an acid to alkaline pH range, though more common in acid soils. It is usually a large shrub 12 to 20 feet high, but can be a small tree up to 35 feet high. It has a dense, fibrous root system with shallow to deep lateral roots, and transplants easily. It is a lovely woody plant with very fragrant, little white flowers in drooping spikes, and depending on how far north, it ranges from evergreen to semi-evergreen to deciduous.

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