1316 plants in this collection
A brilliant dark orange-red selection of Rhododendron flammeum (which see). A Woodlanders'introduction selected by George Mitchell. .
The Oconee azalea is the flame azalea of the lowlands, and for a Southern gardener that difference matters. Where the mountain flame azalea pines for cool Appalachian summers, this Piedmont cousin was born to the heat, thriving in the clay hills and stream bluffs of middle Georgia and South Carolina and taking the humidity of the Deep South in stride. The reward is the same fire in the flower: bright orange to orange-red trusses, sometimes shading to salmon or gold, opening in mid-spring.
'Balsaminaeflorum' is a dwarf evergreen Satsuki azalea, an old Japanese cultivar of Rhododendron indicum grown for flowers that look less like azaleas than like tiny roses. Each bloom is fully double, packed with forty or more petals and carrying neither pistil nor stamens, so the flower is all soft, ruffled color. The cultivar name means balsam-flowered, a nod to the double blooms of the garden balsam, while indicum, meaning of India, is an old misnomer for a plant that is in fact Japanese.
This spreading open-branched evergreen azalea has dull green to yellowish-green fuzzy leaves. The deep pink to rust colored flowers may appear sporadically through summer, but typically this species flowers in the fall, which is a unique feature. Rarely offered in the U.S. this azalea is one of the parents of the now popular "Encore" Hybrids. It is native to Taiwan. Culture is as for other evergreen azaleas.
Pinxterbloom is the wild azalea of the eastern woods, a hardy native that hangs its soft pink flowers along the branches in mid-spring, just before the leaves catch up. The funnel-shaped blooms, pale pink to nearly white, throw long curving stamens well past the petals, giving the whole shrub a hazy, spidery lightness, and carry a faint sweet scent on a warm day. Few native shrubs say spring so plainly.
Among the most beloved of the eastern wild azaleas, Rhododendron periclymenoides drifts through the open woods and swamp margins of the eastern United States from New Hampshire and Massachusetts south to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, opening clouds of pink bloom just as the woodland wakes in spring. This selection breaks from the ordinary pink of the species: a soft lavender-purple color form discovered in Lancaster County, South Carolina, and introduced by Woodlanders, uncommon in the wild and rarer still in cultivation. Botanists once filed the species under the name Rhododendron nudiflorum, and the plant still answers to that older label in many an old garden book.
This native deciduous azalea is considered one of the finest of the American Azaleas. It has orange-red to red flowers in July and August, much later than most native azaleas. It is a rare species found only in western Georgia and eastern Alabama where it grows along sandy ravines and along stream banks. It is the logo plant for the famous Callaway Gardens at Pine Mountain, Georgia which has done much to preserve and popularize this species. Culture as for other native azaleas that prefer well-drained acid soil and light shade.
Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, sets the bar plainly: one of the finest azaleas, the flowers opening just as the leaves expand, with no adequate way to do the plant justice in the written word. The royal azalea earns the praise. Rhododendron schlippenbachii is a deciduous azalea of Korea and the neighboring corners of northeast China, the Russian Far East, and Japan, where the shrub forms the dominant understory across whole hillsides, blooming in soft drifts of pink from four hundred to fifteen hundred meters up the slopes.
The native deciduous azaleas of the southeastern United States bloom in a long relay, from the pinxters and Piedmont azaleas of March through the flame azaleas of April and May and on into July with the red of Rhododendron prunifolium. And then, once most gardeners have closed the azalea chapter for the year, Rhododendron serrulatum opens. Hammocksweet azalea is the last of the line, flowering in August and September and sometimes later still.
A three-hundred-year-old Japanese garden azalea that does not look quite like a rhododendron, does not look quite like an azalea, and does not really look like anything else. The leaves are narrow green ribbons, three to five millimeters wide and a couple of inches long, closer to willow or fine grass than to the broad rounded foliage of an ordinary tsutsuji. The flowers, opening in late April and May, follow the same grammar: deeply divided into long strap-like petals in lilac-pink to lavender-rose, tangled and knotted at first, then unfurling slowly into a shape that reads, depending on the eye, as a crane fly, a spider, or a piece of decorative garnish. Wabi-sabi made evergreen.
The glaucous swamp azalea is a native deciduous shrub of the wetland South and the eastern seaboard, a blue-leaved form of Rhododendron viscosum, the widespread swamp azalea that ranges from the Gulf Coast north into New England. The variety glaucum sets the plant apart with foliage washed in a soft blue-green, most striking on the leaf undersides, which flash pale as a breeze turns them. Where many shrubs falter, this azalea thrives in the consistently moist, even boggy ground of swamps, marshes, and stream banks.
The swamp azalea, Rhododendron viscosum, ordinarily opens white; this selection breaks pink. 'Roseum' is a rose-flushed form of the familiar native, chosen and introduced by Woodlanders from a plant of Aiken County, South Carolina provenance, a home-ground selection that carries the sweet, clove-like fragrance of the species in a warmer color. The swamp azalea ranges widely across the eastern United States, from the Gulf Coast north into New England, threading the wet margins of swamps, bogs, and stream banks where few other flowering shrubs will follow.
'Koromo Shikibu' is the spider azalea, and there is nothing else in the genus quite like the flower. Instead of the usual funnel, each bloom splits into narrow, strap-like petals that spread apart like the legs of a starfish or a spider, lavender to purplish-pink, spotted darker at the base, and carried in such profusion in spring that the whole shrub seems to shimmer. Once seen, the flower is not forgotten.
A spontaneous hybrid, probably including Rhododendron alabamense, R. canescens, and R. flammeum, and blooming in mid-spring. Woodlanders regularly offers several numbered selections in our "Pastel Series," which we introduced, and this is number four. A happy blend of colors that adds interest to any garden.
'Addison' began as a chance seedling of the Alabama azalea, Rhododendron alabamense, and grew into something none of the parents quite predicted. Surely a hybrid, though the exact parentage remains unknown, the plant carries large, dense, dome-shaped terminal clusters that blend shades of yellow, pink, and white in a single truss, a multicolored effect striking enough that the selection first went by the name 'Stunning'. Charles Webb, a good friend of Woodlanders, spotted and selected the seedling in Florida, and the plant now carries the name of one of his young granddaughters.
This hardy hybrid azalea is a piece of Woodlanders history, a deliberate cross made by the nursery's late founder, Robert Mackintosh. Mackintosh crossed the native roseshell azalea, Rhododendron prinophyllum, with the old hybrid group known as R. x kosterana, or mollis azalea, and the result is an upright, large-flowered deciduous shrub carrying bold orange trusses each marked with a splash of yellow.
'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.
Jetbead is an old-fashioned, exceptionally tough deciduous shrub of the rose family, forming an open, multi-stemmed mound roughly three to six feet tall and four to nine feet wide on arching gray-brown stems. The opposite, sharply toothed leaves break very early in spring, and four-petaled white flowers about two inches across open at the shoot tips in May and June. Clusters of three or four glossy black drupes follow in fall and hang on well into winter, the shining beads that give jetbead the common name.
