A small, slow Japanese cedar that flushes the color of cold lemonade in spring, pale, almost translucent yellow, then settles into soft chartreuse through summer. The foliage stays juvenile throughout, fine and feathery rather than the awl-shaped scale of a mature Cryptomeria, which gives 'Lemonade' a softer presence than most gardeners expect of a conifer. This is texture you can run a hand through.
This spiny, sprawling, half-vining shrub carries glossy evergreen leaves and a tangle of thorns. Sometimes classified as a Maclura and related to the native Osage orange, cockspur thorn ranges widely across eastern Asia and south to Australia, yet stays rare and little known in North America, familiar mostly to a few bonsai enthusiasts.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
15–30 ft.
Bloom
Green
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support, pain relief, reproductive health
This is the silvery blue-needled form of the China fir, and the color is the reason to choose it over the ordinary green. Needles are broad, flat, stiff, and sharply pointed, an inch or two long, arranged in spirals that read as flat sprays and holding a distinct glaucous blue that intensifies in good light. The frame is boldly pyramidal with tiered horizontal branching, reaching forty to sixty feet in cultivation here, considerably more in China. Old bark peels in long strips to reveal reddish brown beneath. Dead needles hang on inside the crown for a year or two, which some gardeners dislike and others regard as part of the character; either way, a China fir is never mistaken for anything else.
The Sago Palm is not a palm at all. Cycas revoluta belongs to the cycads, an ancient line of seed-bearing gymnosperms far closer to conifers than to any true palm, and the feathered crown is a case of convergent evolution rather than kinship. Cycads carried this same architecture through the age of the dinosaurs, which is part of what lends the Sago Palm such a primeval presence in a modern garden.
Hardiness
Zones 8–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–10 ft.
Spread
5–8 ft.
Plant type
Cycad
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, heart support
Once thought lost to time and development, Cyrilla arida, known as Scrub Titi, is a botanical rarity with a story as striking as the summer bloom. The famed botanist J.K. Small first described this shrub in the early twentieth century from the desert-like scrub of central Florida. For decades the identity of Scrub Titi was debated and any wild presence uncertain, until a dedicated search led to rediscovery by Kenneth Wurdack and the Woodlanders team in Highlands County, Florida. That tiny remnant population may now be gone, and Cyrilla arida may no longer exist in the wild, which makes every plant in cultivation all the more precious.
Cyrilla parviflora, the Littleleaf Cyrilla, is a small, understated shrub that carries the quiet resilience of the southeastern wetlands. A close relative of the larger Cyrilla racemiflora, this plant offers a finer, more delicate presence, with slender glossy leaves and airy clusters of tiny white flowers.
Cyrilla parvifolia 'Small Leaf' is a rare, fine-textured native selection that we collected in Franklin County, Florida, prized for the distinctly small, evergreen leaves and the delicate, branching habit. Though sometimes grouped botanically with Cyrilla racemiflora, the more widespread Coastal Titi, this selection stands apart in both form and foliage, an easy standout in native and ornamental plantings alike.
Titi is one of the quiet workhorses of the southern wetland, an evergreen to semi-evergreen shrub or small tree that ranges farther than almost any other native of the region, from the coastal plain of southern Virginia down through Florida and west to eastern Texas. In the wild the plant haunts the edges of swamps, bays, and blackwater streams, standing in the wet, acid ground where few woody plants thrive, yet takes with surprising ease to ordinary garden soil.
'Graniteville' is a low, ground-hugging selection of Cyrilla racemiflora, the native Titi, and one of the more distinctive forms of a plant already known for variability. Where the species can build into a small tree, this Woodlanders introduction stays wide and knee-high, and the story behind the plant is a piece of local botanizing: we propagated 'Graniteville' from an almost prostrate individual found years ago on an eroded sandhills seepage slope near Graniteville, South Carolina, and the ground-hugging habit has held true ever since in cultivation.
This evergreen Old World fern has dark leathery leaflets suggesting holly leaves. It is an attractive coarse fern well-suited to moist shady spots in the garden or against walls. It is a favorite in many Deep South gardens.
Few plants carry their history as plainly as Danae racemosa. The name reaches back to Greek myth, to Danae, daughter of the king of Argos, and the foliage carries a heavier classical freight than almost anything else you can grow in shade: Roman poet laureates are said to have worn the sprays as their wreath, and Alexander the Great may have taken his victory crowns from the same hills where he was fighting. Hence the two common names that have followed the plant for centuries, poet's laurel and Alexandrian laurel. Danae is, for the record, no true laurel at all.
Winter Daphne is one of the most beloved and most exasperating shrubs in the southern garden, grown for a fragrance that arrives in the dead of winter and carries clear across a yard. In late winter the dense, rounded evergreen opens tight clusters of small, waxy, rose-pink flowers, and the scent, sweet and far-reaching, is the whole argument for growing the plant. This is the non-variegated form, with clear pink bloom and glossy, unmarked deep green leaves.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–5 ft.
Spread
4–5 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, topical applications, respiratory support
Daphniphyllum calycinum is a bold evergreen shrub that looks, at a glance, like a rhododendron, though the two are unrelated. Handsome, leathery, oval leaves cluster toward the branch tips, deep green above and glaucous, almost bluish-white beneath, giving the plant an exotic, architectural presence in the shade garden. Grown almost entirely for that striking foliage, this is a shrub for the collector rather than the crowd, and one virtually unknown in North American gardens.
Decumaria barbara, the native woodvamp or wild climbing hydrangea, is a self-clinging woody vine of the southeastern United States, grown for glossy foliage and flat, creamy-white flower clusters that echo those of the true hydrangeas in early summer. In the wild the vine belongs to wet bottomland forests and swamp margins, and also climbs in the rich, moist coves of the southern Appalachians, hauling itself up tree trunks on hairy aerial rootlets, the holdfasts that let the plant grip bark, brick, or stone without any support at all.
Dendropanax trifidus is one of those quiet, aristocratic evergreens that rewards a second look and then a third. To the casual eye the plant reads as a glossy, tropical-looking small tree, something you would expect to sulk at the first frost; in truth this is a tough, warm-temperate native of the coastal forests of southern Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, hardy well into the Southeast and unbothered by heat, humidity, or a mild winter.
Dianella tasmanica 'Variegata' is a strappy evergreen perennial grown above all for foliage: arching, sword-shaped leaves boldly striped in white and green that stay dense and upright through the season and lend crisp, year-round structure to a bed. In spring and early summer, airy panicles of small, star-shaped, blue to violet flowers rise on wiry stems above the leaves, followed by glossy, deep blue berries that gleam against the pale striping, an unusual and long-lasting ornamental touch that gives the plant a second season of interest.
