This is a Woodlanders plant in the most literal sense: selected, named, and introduced to the American nursery trade by this nursery, in this town, decades ago. The cultivar now carries our name across the country. One Green World in Oregon, Cistus on Sauvie Island, Greenleaf as a national wholesaler, Wilson Bros in three-gallon, Cloud Mountain Farm in Washington, Dancing Oaks in the Willamette Valley, and dozens of regional nurseries from Louisiana to Idaho all carry the plant. Few cultivars in American horticulture are so permanently tied to a single small nursery in Aiken, South Carolina. To buy here is to buy at the source.
Callistemon brachyandrus, the prickly or desert bottlebrush, comes from the arid inland of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, and wears that origin in every part. The short, stiff, needle-fine leaves end in a sharp point and give the shrub the prickly common name, a fine gray-green texture quite unlike the broad-leaved bottlebrushes. The brushes are the real surprise: deep red stamens tipped with yellow anthers, so each flower looks dusted with gold, and they open in summer, after most other bottlebrush have finished.
Callistemon citrinus, the crimson bottlebrush, is the plant most people picture when they hear the common name, and the parent of a good share of the red-flowered selections in the trade. The lance-shaped leaves emerge coppery and pink, harden to a soft gray-green, and give up a clean lemon scent when bruised, the trait the species epithet records. Bright crimson brushes, four inches or so, come in a heavy flush in late spring and then intermittently through the warm months, each one a generous well of nectar for hummingbirds and bees.
Callistemon macropunctatus, the scarlet bottlebrush, is a plant of the drier inland country of southeastern Australia, and the toughness shows. The narrow, sharply pointed leaves are studded with large oil glands, the big dots the species epithet names, and release a sharp, resinous scent when crushed. Flowering runs from olive-green in bud to a deep scarlet as the brushes open across late spring and summer, vivid against the stiff foliage.
An evergreen bottlebrush with arching to pendulous branches and dark green, lance-shaped leaves, Callistemon paludosus carries terminal, pink bottlebrush spikes freely in midsummer, an unusual color in a genus mostly given to red. Relatively cold-hardy for a bottlebrush, this is a graceful, easy shrub for a hot, sunny spot.
Of the thirty-odd bottlebrushes, this is the one Australian growers reach for when they want the word spectacular to mean something. Callistemon phoeniceus is endemic to the southwest corner of Western Australia, a hard, sandy, summer-dry country, and the shrub arrives in spring and summer carrying scarlet brushes four to six inches long, each one finished with a dark tip so the whole spike reads as red shading into near-black. The leaves are the other half of the appeal: thick, stiff, and distinctly blue-green, holding that cool grey cast right through the year, which makes the red land harder than red on ordinary green ever does.
Pine-leaved bottlebrush earns the name honestly: the foliage is fine, stiff, and needle-like, closer to a young pine than to the broad leaves of most bottlebrushes, and the whole shrub stands upright and a little spare, which is part of the charm. Native to southeastern Australia, this species is uncommon in cultivation in the southern United States, so growing one is a small act of plant collecting.
An exceptional cold-hardy bottlebrush, Callistemon rigidus 'Clemson' is a compact to medium evergreen shrub hung with brilliant red, brush-like flowers that bloom heavily in late spring and often rebloom through summer. Native to Australia, this selection defies expectations for the genus by thriving outdoors in upstate South Carolina, where winters are usually too cold for bottlebrushes.
Callistemon salignus, the willow bottlebrush, is the graceful one, a large shrub or small tree hung with narrow, willow-like leaves and lit each spring by silky new growth of bright pink to copper, the plant's finest moment. The brushes that follow are soft and pale, creamy white to lemon, sometimes flushed pink in selected forms, and the trunk carries a beautiful papery white bark that peels away in thin sheets. Few bottlebrush read as elegant; the willow bottlebrush does.
The weeping bottlebrush is the one most Americans have already met without knowing the name, a small tree of crimson brushes and long hanging branchlets planted through Florida and the Gulf Coast until a hard freeze thins the ranks and somebody plants them again. In the wild Callistemon viminalis runs down the eastern edge of Australia from Cape York into northeastern New South Wales, and almost always along water: creek banks, seasonal channels, the damp sand beside a watercourse. That habitat explains the two things that set this species apart from the rest of the genus. The branches hang rather than stand, giving the whole tree a fountain habit that carries even out of flower, and the roots will tolerate heavier ground and less than perfect drainage, which almost no other bottlebrush will.
Among the many bottlebrushes, most of which flower fire-engine red, Callistemon viridiflorus goes a different way, opening in greenish yellow brushes over short, prickly evergreen leaves. Native to Tasmania, this is one of the cold-hardier members of the genus and may hold to zone 7.
Calluna vulgaris 'Gold Haze' is a heather grown as much for foliage as for flower: tight, upright sprays of bright golden growth that hold their color through the year and warm to a deeper gold in winter cold. Set in drifts, the plants knit into a low, even evergreen carpet.
Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
Calycanthus floridus 'Athens', also circulated under the name 'Katherine', is a yellow-flowered selection of the Eastern sweetshrub, a deciduous native of the Southeastern woodlands long grown for fragrance, adaptability, and strange, many-tepaled flowers. Where the wild plant blooms a deep maroon, 'Athens' opens soft, buttery yellow, an unexpected and elegant turn on a familiar shrub.
Calycanthus floridus 'Michael Lindsey' is the sweetshrub gardeners reach for when fragrance is the whole point. The species, Carolina allspice, is a southeastern native beloved for reddish-brown flowers that smell of ripe fruit, but the scent varies wildly from seedling to seedling, and 'Michael Lindsey' was chosen precisely for a rich, dependable perfume. Add glossy dark green foliage and clear golden fall color, and this selection has become a benchmark, one the plantsman Michael Dirr called the standard by which other introductions will be measured.
Calycanthus 'Venus' is a white-flowered sweetshrub bred by Dr. Tom Ranney at North Carolina State University, drawing on three species at once: the Eastern Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus), the California sweetshrub (Calycanthus occidentalis), and the Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis, long known as Sinocalycanthus). The result is a deciduous shrub that carries the best of all three: hardiness, substance, and an unusual flower.
Born of careful hands and watchful eyes at the JC Raulston Arboretum in North Carolina, Calycanthus × raulstonii 'Hartlage Wine' is a sweetshrub of uncommon grace. Richard Hartlage made the cross as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in 1991, pairing the Southern native Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus) with the refined Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis); the seedling first flowered in 1996, and the hybrid name honors J.C. Raulston, the arboretum's late director.
Two camellias do most of the work in American gardens, Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua, in countless named forms. The Far East holds far more, and Woodlanders is among the few nurseries offering the lesser-known species to gardeners here. Camellia crapnelliana, the Crapnell camellia, is one of the most distinctive: a slow, upright evergreen first described from Hong Kong Island and named for the collector Crapnell.
Most gardeners who grow camellias know two of them. Camellia japonica opens in winter, C. sasanqua in autumn, and between the two a practiced collector can have flowers from October through March. What happens in April is generally someone else's problem.
Camellia euryoides offers a quiet counterpoint to the camellias most familiar to American gardeners. Where Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua have long defined the genus in cultivation here, those two represent only a sliver of a far broader Asian lineage. C. euryoides, a shrub or small tree of the subtropical forests of Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangxi, belongs to that richer world of species camellias: subtler, finer in texture, and made for gardeners curious about the genus beyond its showiest forms.
