'Casille' arose spontaneously, a chance hybrid among three of the southeastern native azaleas: the white, lemon-scented Alabama azalea, Rhododendron alabamense; the fragrant pink Piedmont azalea, R. canescens; and the fiery, unscented Oconee azalea, R. flammeum. From that three-way mingling came a deciduous shrub that blooms in mid-spring in a lively pastel blend, the flowers shifting through pink, white, and soft yellow with a subtle sweetness inherited from the fragrant parents. An exclusive Woodlanders introduction, the plant was named by George Mitchell for his wife.
A rare evergreen shrub or small tree from southern China and the neighboring subtropics, Rhodoleia championii is a connoisseur's plant, dramatic in bloom, refined in habit, and quietly excellent the year round. Thick, glossy, rounded leaves cloak the plant in deep green, and their softly glaucous, blue-gray undersides catch the light and every passing breeze, giving even the out-of-flower plant a handsome, layered presence.
The lesser-known of the two Hong Kong roses in the Woodlanders collection, Rhodoleia henryi is a handsome evergreen shrub or small tree from southern China and Taiwan, still little grown in the United States and, like much of the genus, occasionally muddled in the naming. Set beside the sister species Rhodoleia championii, this plant carries narrower, more pointed leaves, and the species is reckoned the more cold hardy of the two, a useful distinction for gardeners testing the edge of the range.
Fragrant sumac is a versatile deciduous shrub native across much of the eastern and central United States, where the plant threads scattered woodlands, rocky slopes, and open banks. The trifoliate leaves, often mistaken at a glance for poison oak, are entirely harmless, and a crushed leaf releases the clean, lemony-resinous scent that gives the plant every one of the common names, from fragrant sumac to skunkbush, depending on the nose. The genus name Rhus is the old Greek and Latin word for the sumacs, and the epithet aromatica names the scent directly.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
'Gro-Low' is the ground-hugging form of the native fragrant sumac, a low, wide-spreading deciduous shrub that stays one to two feet tall while reaching six to eight feet across, knitting into a dense, weed-smothering carpet. The glossy trifoliate leaves are often mistaken at a glance for poison ivy or poison oak but are entirely harmless, and a crushed leaf gives off the clean, lemony scent that names the species.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Groundcover
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Smooth sumac is a bold, colony-forming native shrub of the eastern and central United States, in time reaching the scale of a small tree, and one of the finest plants going for a hot, dry, sunny site where little else will thrive. The long, pinnately compound leaves give an almost tropical texture through summer, and the plant spreads by root suckers into broad, picturesque colonies, or can be held to a single tree-like specimen where the suckers are controlled.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun
Height
9–15 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Rhus javanica, better known today as Rhus chinensis, is the Chinese sumac or nutgall tree, a fast, adaptable deciduous large shrub or small tree of East and Southeast Asia, in time reaching fifteen to twenty-five feet. The pinnate leaves, carried on downy shoots and set along a distinctively winged leaf stalk, turn vivid yellow to red in autumn, and creamy panicles of small flowers open in late summer, feeding bees when much of the garden has finished.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
12–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
Michaux's sumac is a low, colony-forming native shrub, rhizomatous and densely hairy, rising only one to three feet on erect stems from a spreading root system. The compound leaves turn beautiful shades of orange and red in fall, and the dwarf, running habit makes the plant a fine, well-behaved groundcover-scale sumac for a sunny to lightly shaded native planting.
Littleleaf sumac is a big, bushy deciduous shrub of west Texas, the Southwest, and adjoining Mexico, built for heat, sun, and drought. The compound leaves are made up of tiny leaflets that give a fine, almost feathery texture, and they turn rose to purple in fall, an unusual and lovely tone among the sumacs. Tough and dryland-hardy, the plant is well worth trying in the South and any hot, well-drained garden.
Staghorn sumac is a bold native shrub or small tree of the northeastern United States and Canada, growing fifteen to thirty feet on stout, forking stems clothed in fine velvety hairs, the texture and antler-like branching that give the plant the name. The big, pinnate leaves are bright green through summer and turn a spectacular blend of yellow, orange, and red in fall, one of the great autumn shrubs of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–30 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Granite gooseberry is a rare native shrub of the rocky, granitic soils of the Southeast, turning up in widely scattered localities from Georgia to Texas. A low, deciduous plant of two to four feet, the arching branches root where they touch the ground and knit slowly into colonies, and the small, three-lobed leaves and purple, red-spined stems give the shrub a fine, distinctive texture.
The dwarf pink locust is a charming, little-known native shrub, a low, stoloniferous plant of one to two feet with compound, deciduous leaves and hanging clusters of pretty pink pea flowers in spring. Scattered through the sandy pinelands of the southeastern United States, the plant spreads quietly by underground runners into a low colony, since seed is virtually never set and the shrub increases almost entirely by vegetative means.
This showy little locust came to Woodlanders by a happy accident. Planted years ago alongside a row of black locusts, Robinia pseudoacacia, on a nearby farm, one tree surprised everyone by opening not the usual white but clusters of vivid rose-purple pea flowers over compound leaves, followed by small, rough, slightly bristly seed pods. The origin is uncertain: a North American species, likely, but possibly a seedling from seed received years ago from China.
The single white Lady Banks rose is the wild original, the mother of the whole clan, and to many noses the most fragrant rose in the garden. This is the species itself, Rosa banksiae in the true, single-flowered form, a vigorous, all but thornless evergreen climber from the hills and gorges of central China, capable of thirty or forty feet where a wall or a big tree will hold the weight. In spring the long, smooth green canes disappear under great hanging sprays of small single white flowers, each with a boss of gold stamens and a clean, sweet, violet-like scent that carries across a garden.
Rosa 'Louis Philippe' came into the world in 1834 at Angers, France, raised by the rosarian Modeste Guérin and named for the man then on the throne, Louis Philippe, the Citizen King. His blood was royal in a second sense. Guérin is said to have bred him from 'Slater's Crimson China', one of the handful of repeat-blooming China roses that had reached Europe a generation earlier and overturned everything Western gardeners thought a rose could do. That rose had grown in Empress Joséphine's garden at Malmaison and been painted there by Redouté, and cuttings of its line found their way to Guérin's bench. This was a fashionable, well-connected rose, bound for the gardens of the European elite.
The pink Cherokee rose is a big, vigorous, early-flowering climber grown for one glorious effect: large, single, silvery-pink flowers, up to four inches across, each a simple five-petaled saucer lit by a central boss of gold stamens. Where the true Cherokee rose blooms white, this one blooms in clear, soft pink, and opens early, in the first warm reach of spring, ahead of most roses.
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
A small rose with a long story. 'Magic Dragon' is a 1969 introduction by Ralph S. Moore (1907 to 2009), the legendary Father of Miniature Roses, who bred more than three hundred cultivars from a small nursery in Visalia, California across nearly seven decades. Moore all but invented the climbing miniature category single-handedly, crossing tiny old varieties like Rouletti with full-sized climbers and selecting the offspring that kept the small leaves and flowers but stretched into climbing wood.
Nearly every rose in your garden that blooms more than once a year owes a debt to this one. 'Old Blush' is a China rose, bred in China for something close to a thousand years and known there as the monthly pink, and they are generally reckoned the first East Asian rose to reach Europe, recorded in Sweden by 1752 and offered in England as Parson's Pink China in 1793. They brought with them the one thing Western roses simply did not have: the habit of blooming again and again across the season rather than once and done. Crossed into the old European roses, that single trait rewrote the genus. On the Ile Bourbon they met an autumn damask and produced the Bourbons; in Charleston, just down the road, the rice planter John Champneys crossed them with a musk rose and produced the first Noisette, the only rose class born in the American South. Bourbons, Noisettes, hybrid perpetuals, and in time the hybrid teas all trace back through this unassuming pink shrub. 'Old Blush' could have retired on the legacy and instead just kept flowering. In the South they are very nearly everblooming, throwing clusters of soft semi-double pink that, in the China way, deepen rather than fade in the sun, blush going to rose as each flower ages. The canes are nearly thornless, the constitution famously tough; these are the roses you still find blooming alone at abandoned homesteads, having outlived the house and the gardener both. Grow them for the flowers. Know that you are also growing the root of the whole modern family.
Rosemary is a timeless classic in both the garden and the kitchen, an aromatic evergreen shrub of the sun-baked Mediterranean coast, so distinctive that botanists long kept rosemary in a genus apart, Rosmarinus officinalis, before recent study moved the herb into the sages as Salvia rosmarinus. The old genus name means dew of the sea, for the plant's love of bright, salt-swept coastal hillsides. Slender, needle-like, deep green leaves clothe the woody stems the year round, and soft blue flowers open along them from winter into spring.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
