Blue vervain rises in summer as a candelabra of slender, pencil-thin spikes, each one lit from the base upward with tiny, five-lobed flowers in a saturated purplish blue that few native perennials can match. Verbena hastata is a clump-forming perennial of eastern North America, reaching two to four feet in good ground and occasionally stretching to six, on stiff, square, hairy stems that branch toward the top. The lance-shaped leaves are sharply toothed and rough to the touch, a coarse green foil for the refined flower spikes above. Bloom comes slowly and deliberately from July into September, only a few florets open on each spike at any moment, so the plant seems to smolder for weeks rather than flare all at once.
Ironweed earns the name twice over. The stems are stiff enough to stand through a hurricane season without staking, and the seedheads that follow the flowers rust to the exact color of weathered iron. But the reason to grow Vernonia noveboracensis is the purple: not the tidy lavender of garden asters but a saturated, almost fluorescent violet that arrives in late July and holds into October, riding five to eight feet up on strong green stems above a mass of long, finely toothed leaves. Few native perennials carry a color this pure so late in the year.
'Chindo' is a bold, glossy-leaved evergreen viburnum, a vigorous selection grown for both ornamental drama and Southern toughness, hung in season with cascading clusters of brilliant red fruit. Few broadleaf evergreens offer this combination of shine, structure, and seasonal display at so substantial a scale.
The cinnamon-leaf viburnum is one of the great broadleaf evergreens of the genus, a substantial, dignified shrub from the mountain forests of western China, where mist gathers in the valleys and plants grow with quiet endurance. The species name cinnamomifolium means leaves like cinnamon, for the large, glossy, deeply triple-veined leaves that echo those of a true cinnamon tree, tooled and leathery as fine bookbinding. This is a plant that holds the line rather than blooms and fades with the hour.
Carl Peter Thunberg, the Swedish physician who talked his way onto the Dutch trading island of Dejima in 1775 and used the post to become one of the first Europeans to seriously botanize a closed Japan, was the first to describe this plant to science. Richard Oldham, the last of the great Kew collectors, gathered the shrub again near Nagasaki in 1862 and called the plant, a little dismissively, a small tree on the hills. In a garden the plant never quite loses that ambition, settling instead into a sturdy, slow evergreen bush.
Luzon viburnum is one of the quiet unknowns of Southern gardening, a handsome large shrub grown around Houston for years and almost nowhere else in the United States. Woodlanders collected this plant in the Houston area, where the species had already proven durable and undemanding in Gulf Coast heat. Viburnum luzonicum comes from open forest, scrub, and roadside thickets across southern China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and the epithet points to Luzon, largest of the Philippine islands, from which Robert Allen Rolfe described the species at Kew.
They carry their Roman name almost unchanged. Tinus was what the Romans called the shrub two thousand years ago, the name Pliny the Elder set down in his Natural History, and when Linnaeus came to catalogue them he simply kept it. The reason gardeners have held onto Viburnum tinus just as long is that they flower in the cold. While the rest of the garden is shut down for winter, they cover themselves in tight clusters of deep carmine buds that open a few at a time across weeks into small white flowers, so they carry both colors at once through the bleakest stretch of the year. The foliage is the second argument, dense and dark and glossy, evergreen to the ground with none of the gapping that lesser shrubs fall into. 'Spring Bouquet' is the compact, well-behaved selection, rounding into a tidy four to six feet, which makes it the one to reach for when you want a hedge, a low screen, or a piece of evergreen structure that also happens to bloom in February. Metallic blue-black berries follow for the birds, set best when more than one plant grows nearby. They take shade, salt, and coastal wind without complaint. Few evergreens hand you this much in the dead of winter, which is precisely the season you'll be grateful for it.
Some plants stand quietly in the garden, and some speak. Vitex agnus-castus has been speaking for more than two thousand years, from sun-washed Mediterranean shores to monastery cloisters, from the herbals of ancient Greece to the borders of Southern gardens. In Homer's day the fragrant leaves and lavender flower spikes were woven into ritual garlands. The Romans knew the shrub as the chaste tree, a name wrapped in legend, since the peppery seeds were once thought to cool passion, which earned the seeds the cloister nickname of monk's pepper. The double name says as much twice over: agnus is Latin for lamb and castus for chaste, while the genus Vitex comes from vieo, to weave, a nod to the pliant branches once bent into baskets.
Weigela is a deciduous shrub of rounded habit and opposite oval leaves. This cold-hardy old-fashioned favorite is native to eastern Asia. 'Java Red' is an old variety also known as 'Foliis Purpureis'.
Every nursery keeps a working cap, the one that lives on the dashboard and comes back smelling of pine bark and potting mix. Ours wears an oak. Quercus has always been the South's way of keeping time, the tree you put in the ground for somebody you'll never meet, so it felt right to stitch one above the Woodlanders name.
Gift your loved ones the beauty of nature with the Woodlanders Gift Card. Perfect for plant lovers and avid gardeners, this card will bring a smile to their face and endless possibilities to their garden. Share the joy of gardening with a gift that keeps on giving!
Before there were nurseries there were glasshouses, and before glasshouses there was a single cutting kept alive under a bell of glass, carried across an ocean on the chance it might root. The front of this one is a nod to that older instinct, the one that says a plant worth having is a plant worth protecting: a specimen held in a glass vase, lit like it's the only one of its kind. Some days at the nursery, it is.
We first made these tees for our own crew at the nursery—something soft enough for long propagation days, sturdy enough to survive soil, sun, and the occasional splash from the hose. Now it’s your turn to wear the mark. Think of it as a modern field uniform for rare-plant people: understated, durable, and just nerdy enough for those who know their Schima from their Franklinia (and yes, we see you, Schimlinia fans).
John Bartram collected Xanthorhiza simplicissima from the Carolina mountains sometime before 1776 and brought the plant back to his famous Philadelphia garden, which tells you two things: that yellowroot has been in cultivation for as long as this country has existed, and that people who know plants have always recognized something worth paying attention to here. The Cherokee had known the plant far longer, using the roots, sliced open to reveal a vivid, almost electric chrome yellow, as a dye, a bitter tonic, and a medicine for ailments from mouth sores to stomach complaints. The active compound is berberine, the same antimicrobial alkaloid found in goldenseal, and the roots produce berberine in striking quantity. Xanthorhiza is Greek for yellow root, and the name is no metaphor.
A rain lily that flowers on a whim of the weather, and a plant that spent nearly forty years under the wrong name. Zephyranthes macrosiphon is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to eastern Mexico, grown for vivid rose-pink flowers that open as if overnight after warm-season rain.
A cold-hardy citrus with a Woodlanders pedigree. Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids that stand outdoors beyond the usual citrus belt, and the calamandarin is one of the toughest. Likely a hybrid of a mandarin, Citrus reticulata, and a calamondin, the calamandarin blends easy-peeling, tangerine-like fruit with the cold tolerance that calamondin brings to the cross.
Woodlanders has long been a leader in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the 'Razzlequat' is one of the odder and hardier of the lot. The plant is a cross between the Australian desert lime, Eremocitrus glauca, a tough, drought- and cold-tolerant native of the arid Australian interior, and, most likely, the familiar 'Meyer' lemon. From the desert lime parent come thorny, wiry branches, small narrow gray-green leaves, and a hardiness and drought tolerance rare among citrus; from the lemon come size and flavor.
A modern Franklin tree with year-round presence and late-summer perfume. ×Schimlinia 'Schima Lina Ding Dong' is a rare intergeneric hybrid bred to capture the romance of the lost Franklin tree while adding real garden durability. Raised by the Mountain Crop Improvement Lab at NC State, the selection crosses Franklinia alatamaha, the legendary Georgia native long gone from the wild and famous for luminous white flowers, with Schima remotiserrata, a broadleaf evergreen of the tea family from Asia. The result is an elegant evergreen carrying fragrant, white, camellia-like blooms in late summer, just when the garden most wants a fresh highlight.
A seldom-seen species with old-world charm, Abelia chinensis is a deciduous shrub native to China and one of the foundational parents of the widely grown Abelia x grandiflora. Far less common in American gardens than its hybrid offspring, the true species offers its own quiet distinctions: larger foliage, a fuller habit, and a long summer season of bloom that makes it a thoughtful choice for collectors and pollinator gardeners alike.
Abeliophyllum is a genus of a single species, first described from Korea in 1919 and grown in Western gardens since the 1930s, when it earned an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society. It belongs to the olive family beside lilac and forsythia, and in the wild it clings on at only a handful of Korean sites, where it is now protected by law as an endangered plant. This is the white-flowered species itself, the parent of the better-known pink form.
