The first of Bartram's curious shrubs is the tree no one has seen growing wild since 1803. John and William Bartram came upon it on October 1, 1765, after losing their way to the river crossing at Fort Barrington. Two or three acres of sandy bottomland along the Altamaha — that was the entire global range of Franklinia alatamaha, then and forever. William returned alone in 1773 and again in 1776 to collect seed, and named the plant for his father's old Philadelphia friend Benjamin Franklin. It first flowered in his garden in 1781.

Every Franklinia alive today, in every botanic garden from Wakehurst to Wave Hill, descends from those Bartram seedlings. Cause of the wild extinction unknown. Perhaps a soil pathogen, perhaps Atlantic White Cedar logging, perhaps simply that the population was always too small to outlast a bad century. The flowers — five-petaled, white, fragrant, opening cup-shaped against scarlet autumn leaves — are the closest thing American horticulture has to a relic. Woodlanders has carried Franklinia since the early years. We propagate it from cuttings off our own stock plants, which trace back, as everyone's does, to a Quaker garden on the Schuylkill in 1781.

The second of the two curious shrubs is the one Bartram first noticed for its bracts — those great pink-petal-looking things that aren't petals at all, but modified leaves, like a poinsettia's. Pinckneya is in the coffee family, a near relation of the cinchona tree of South America, and the bark was used by the Creek and by colonial physicians as a febrifuge — hence the common name. Bartram found it in the wet acid bottoms of southeastern Georgia, where it remains rare. It is a strange tree, leggy and a little awkward in youth, and then in early summer the bracts unfold and the whole thing looks improbable. We have offered Bartram's second curious shrub more or less continuously since the early 1980s, sourced originally from wild populations in the Coastal Plain and now grown on at the nursery. There are still not many places to find one.

Bartram knew sweetbay as Magnolia glauca — the southern-form variety australis wasn't segregated until Sargent's work in the next century — and he listed it in nearly every coastal hammock he passed through. The southern form is the evergreen one, with leaves silver-backed and fragrant when crushed. Lemon-scented flowers from June into September. Bartram noted the indigenous use of the leaves as tea and spice; eighteenth-century physicians prescribed bark decoctions for fevers. We have grown the southern variety for decades because the more common nursery clone — the deciduous northern form — is a different and frankly less interesting plant in a southern garden.

Bartram drew the pawpaw — not the common triloba but the dwarf species he found in the Florida sandhills, which he called Annona pygmea. Both turn up in his lists for the bottomland forests of Georgia and the Carolinas. The custard fruit, the largest edible fruit native to the continent, was already well known to the Creek and the Cherokee; Bartram was less impressed by the flavor than by the tree's ungainly tropical look in a temperate forest. Later horticulturists came around. The Georgia Native Plant Society named Asimina triloba its Plant of the Year for 2026. The leaves, long and tropical and drooping, do not look like the foliage of a tree from this part of the world, which is precisely the point.

Bartram listed willow oak — Quercus phillos, by his Linnaean spelling — among the trees of the great river-bottom forests of coastal Georgia and the Carolina lowcountry. It is the southern oak that doesn't look like an oak. Narrow lanceolate leaves, almost willow-like, and a trunk that wants to be enormous. Bartram's notes on the tree are almost entirely topographic: where it grew, what it grew with, how the soil looked underneath it. He had a forester's eye long before that was a profession. We grow Quercus phellos from acorn collected within a hundred miles of the nursery — local provenance matters in a tree that may outlive the house it shades by a century or two.

Bartram knew it as French mulberry. He listed Callicarpa in nearly every site description from the Georgia coast through the Florida hammocks — in old fields where Indigenous towns had stood, in the understory of pine forests, on shell middens above the Indian coast of the St. Johns. He recorded the Creek cultivating it, which is the earliest written evidence that the species was already in active garden use on this continent. The genus name is from the Greek for beautiful fruit, and the late-summer berries — that improbable, almost candy-violet — are still the easiest way to find the plant in a southeastern wood in October.

Bartram came upon flame azalea on the slopes between the Savannah and the Cherokee towns, in such mass that — he wrote — the company was alarmed at the apparent fire on the hillside above them. The species was not formally described and named until John Torrey took it up in 1824, but Bartram's prose drawing is better than the type description. The buds open before the leaves expand, candle-flame-shaped, anywhere from clear yellow through apricot to a vermillion that genuinely does look, in mass and from a distance, like a fire on a ridge. We carry several of the native deciduous azaleas Bartram would have known — R. calendulaceum from the mountain populations, and R. austrinum from the Florida panhandle, including selections like 'Don's Variegated' and the pure-yellow form that we have been propagating for years.

Bartram introduced the oakleaf hydrangea to science. He found it in Alabama on his 1775 leg west of the Chattahoochee, drew it, named it, and included a copperplate of it in Travels — one of only eight illustrations in the book. The species has remained almost endemic to the rich woods of central Alabama and adjacent Georgia, though it now grows in cultivation across the temperate world. The state of Alabama eventually made it the state wildflower. The leaves, oak-shaped and large, color in autumn through wine and bronze; the panicles dry on the plant and hold through winter; the bark exfoliates in cinnamon strips. Few American shrubs do as much in one body. Woodlanders has long maintained a deep bench of H. quercifolia selections — 'Snowflake,' 'Alice,' 'Alison,' and the species itself — because the cultivar landscape in this plant is genuinely worth navigating, and most garden centers carry one or two and call it complete.

Bartram's journey west of the Chattahoochee turned up a new species of Æsculus in the Apalachicola country — almost certainly this one, the bottlebrush. It is the buckeye that flowers in midsummer when nothing else of any size is doing much, eighteen-inch white spires lit with red-pink stamens, drawing every pollinator within a half mile. It suckers into broad colonies. In the late-eighteenth-century gardens that picked it up from Bartram material, it became one of the standard substantial summer-flowering shrubs of the eastern seaboard. We carry both the species and the late-flowering variety serotina, which holds the bottlebrushes well into the heart of summer when little else of interest is in bloom.

Among the "sweet shrubs" Bartram listed in the dogwood-ridden uplands of his northbound piedmont route, Stewartia sits near the top. The flowers are white, three inches across, with five crinkled petals and a center filled with purple filaments and indigo anthers — closer to a camellia in habit than anything else native to the United States, which is no accident, as both are in the Theaceae. It blooms in early summer in the south, July to August in the north, scattered through the leaf axils so that the show goes on for weeks. The species is now considered imperiled in the wild across most of its Coastal Plain range. It resents transplanting, asks for shaded roots, and rewards patience with one of the most beautiful flowers native to this continent.

Bartram found Illicium groves in the swampy bays of East Florida, and revisited them on his way back to Georgia. The plant is not a true anise but smells like one when you crush the leaf. Evergreen, glossy, shade-loving, with maroon starfish-shaped flowers in spring. We have introduced several Illicium selections over the years — including the white-flowered album, the deep red-flowered 'Halley's Comet,' the variegated form, and our own hybrid 'Woodland Ruby,' a cross of I. mexicanum with the white-flowered I. floridanum. Illicium is one of the standard broadleaf evergreens of the southern shade garden now. It was not, when we started.

Bartram listed Halesia tetraptera and H. diptera together, frequently — he saw them in the bottoms of the Carolina piedmont and along the Florida hammocks. The pendant white bells, four to a cluster, hang under the branches in April just as the leaves expand. It is one of the trees that, growing in the southern Appalachian cove forests, makes those forests the most botanically rich temperate woods in North America. The genus honors Stephen Hales, the eighteenth-century English clergyman-physiologist whose Vegetable Staticks the Bartrams read with attention — one of the small footnotes to how a plant ends up with the name it has.

Bartram listed Fothergilla gardini in the wet pinelands and pond margins of coastal Georgia and the Carolinas. The genus was named for John Fothergill — the London Quaker physician who paid Bartram's fifty pounds a year to do all this — and the species for Alexander Garden of Charleston, who hosted the Bartrams. So the plant is, in its name alone, a small map of the eighteenth-century botanical network that made Travels possible. It is also one of the great fall-color shrubs of the southeast: the foliage burns through orange, red, and burgundy on the same plant, sometimes on the same leaf.

The yellowroot is the small thing creeping under the riverbank — eighteen inches tall, deciduous, with celery-like foliage and brownish-purple panicles in early spring. Bartram noted it in the streamsides of the piedmont and the lower mountains. The roots are saffron-yellow and bitter, a Cherokee and Creek bitter tonic, still occasionally used in folk practice. As a garden plant it is the rare native shade groundcover that actually colonizes — slowly, but it does. We have grown it for decades because almost no one else has, and it is too good a plant for that to be true.