The plants you grow for your grandchildren. Canopy trees are the garden's largest and longest-lived residents, the shade-throwers and skyline-makers that set the scale of everything planted beneath them.
Diospyros texana, the Texas persimmon, is a small, tough native tree grown above all for the bark, which peels away in thin flakes to reveal a smooth, mottled patchwork of white, gray, and pink beneath. Intricately and crookedly branched, this is a sculptural little tree, as handsome bare in winter as it is in leaf. A creature of the Texas hill country and northern Mexico, the Texas persimmon shrugs off heat, drought, and lean limestone soil that would defeat softer plants.
The botanical name reads like a compliment: Diospyros joins the Greek dios, divine, to pyros, grain, so the genus translates roughly as "fruit of the gods," a lofty title for a tree that drops sweet, homely orange fruit onto the forest floor each autumn. The common name travels the other direction, plain and American, from the Powhatan word putchamin for a dried fruit, a reminder that Native peoples were drying persimmons into cakes long before the botanists arrived.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
55–60 ft.
Spread
30–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Anacua, Ehretia anacua, is one of the signature small trees of the south Texas brush country and the lower Rio Grande, a member of the borage family that goes by a small crowd of names. The rough, sandpapery upper surface of the leaves earns the tag sandpaper tree, while old-timers along the border call the tree anacua or, corrupted through generations, knockaway. Evergreen to semi-evergreen depending on the winter, the anacua holds dark green, leathery leaves that feel like fine grit under a thumb.
Rare in cultivation and rarer still in bloom, Emmenopterys henryi is a Chinese tree of the coffee family, Rubiaceae, and a close relative of the native fever tree, Pinckneya. Woodlanders was the first nursery to offer the species in the United States, and one of our own trees was the first to display the showy, pink-bracted flowers in the Western Hemisphere, a small piece of horticultural history rooted in South Carolina soil.
The loquat, Eriobotrya japonica, is a handsome broadleaved evergreen of the rose family, kin to apples, pears, and hawthorns, grown for the bold foliage and the early, unusual fruit. Native to the warm-temperate hills of central China and cultivated in Japan for more than a thousand years, the loquat has traveled with settlers throughout the mild-winter world, from the Mediterranean to the American South, where old dooryard trees are a familiar sight. The large, leathery leaves, deeply veined and toothed along the edges, give the tree a lush, almost tropical presence year round.
Exbucklandia populnea is a rare evergreen tree that fools nearly everyone who meets it. The large, glossy, leathery leaves, sometimes shallowly three-lobed and carried on long stalks, look for all the world like those of a tulip poplar, yet the tree belongs to the witch-hazel family, a kinship few would ever guess. Bold and architectural, with bronze-red new growth and curious upright stipules capping each shoot, this is a foliage tree of real presence.
The American beech is one of the great presences of the eastern woods, a large, slow-growing deciduous tree that ranges through rich forests from southern Canada to the Gulf. Toothed oval leaves, several inches long, emerge a clean bright green, turn clear yellow in fall and then a warm russet-brown, and cling to the branches through much of winter, a habit called marcescence that gives the bare woods a soft papery whisper. The trunk is the signature: smooth, silver-gray, and elephantine, so inviting that generations have carved their initials into the living bark, a temptation best resisted since the wounds never truly heal.
Gymnocladus dioicus, the Kentucky coffeetree, is a bold, handsome native shade tree that keeps its own unhurried calendar, among the last trees to leaf out in spring and the first to stand bare in fall. That long leafless season gave the tree a curious name, which means naked branch, and the winter silhouette of thick, blunt, sculptural limbs is a feature in itself. Hillier's great manual calls the Kentucky coffeetree one of the most handsome of all hardy trees, and few who grow one would disagree.
Carolina silverbell is one of the loveliest of the small native trees of the Southern woods, a deciduous tree of the southeastern United States that lights the spring understory with hundreds of little white bells. In April and May, before or as the leaves unfold, the branches hang thick with clusters of nodding, bell-shaped white flowers, an effect much like a flowering dogwood but softer, and just as welcome at the woodland edge.
In spring, the bare gray branches of the two-wing silverbell fill with small white bells, three to six to a cluster, hanging along the year-old wood like a run of tiny lanterns. Each flower is a half-inch, four-lobed cup, and en masse they turn a modest understory tree into one of the quiet highlights of the southern woodland spring. This silverbell grows as a large multi-stemmed shrub or a small tree, rarely more than thirty feet, with an open, layered frame that lets light through to whatever grows below.
Of all the silverbells, this is the one plant hunters remember. Halesia diptera var. magniflora is the large-flowered form of the two-wing silverbell, and the difference is not subtle: the white, bell-shaped flowers run half again larger than the type, sometimes an inch and more across, with the lobes cut so deeply that each bloom flares open like a little white star rather than a closed bell. In full flower, before the leaves are fully out, the branches all but vanish beneath them, and a mature specimen becomes a cloud of white in the April woods.
This is a cold-hardy citrus hybrid bred to carry oranges into gardens too cold for ordinary citrus, a cross between the trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, in the large-flowered form called 'English Large', and the notably hardy Changsha mandarin, Citrus reticulata. Both parents are prized for cold tolerance, and stacking the two produces a small, thorny tree that shrugs off freezes that would kill a true orange. The cross matches the well-known US-852 citrandarin, a hardy-citrus line from the USDA breeding program.
Ilex opaca, the American holly, is the classic evergreen holly of the eastern woods, a medium-size tree with tough, leathery, spine-edged leaves and, on female trees, the bright berries that have meant Christmas for generations. 'Fallaw' keeps the familiar form but changes the color of the fruit: where the wild tree ripens red, this selection hangs clear amber-yellow berries, an uncommon and cheerful contrast against the dark evergreen foliage.
Ilex opaca, the American holly, is the classic evergreen holly of eastern woods, a medium tree with tough, spine-edged, leathery leaves and the bright red berries that have meant Christmas for generations. 'Selected Red' is one of the good ones, a female clone Woodlanders propagated from a group of hollies planted many years ago in Aiken, South Carolina, chosen for very good foliage and an abundant crop of bright red fruit.
The Foster hollies are among the most planted evergreens in the South, a group of hybrids between the native dahoon, Ilex cassine, and the native American holly, Ilex opaca, raised at Foster Nursery in northern Alabama. They carry narrow, dark, lightly spined leaves on a neat pyramidal frame and fruit heavily in red. 'Alagold' is the exception in color: a yellow-berried seedling of Foster number two, hanging clear amber-gold fruit each winter against dark olive-green foliage, on the same dependable, upright, tree-like holly.
The Chinese flame tree is a fast-growing, upright ornamental of coarse, handsome structure, casting medium shade and broadening with age into a rounded crown of twenty to forty feet. A member of the soapberry family (Sapindaceae) native to southern China, Koelreuteria bipinnata carries large, twice-pinnate compound leaves that give the canopy a light, ferny texture through the growing season before turning soft yellow in fall.
The goldenrain tree is a deciduous member of the soapberry family (Sapindaceae), native to China and Korea and long cultivated across eastern Asia. Growing to a rounded twenty-five to thirty-five feet, the tree carries handsome pinnate compound leaves that cast a light, dappled shade, and in early to midsummer, later toward the north, the branches hang with large, airy panicles of small golden-yellow flowers, a soft rain of gold across the crown and the source of the common name goldenrain tree.
'Woodlanders Low Form' is a rare, shrubby selection of the goldenrain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata), a compact form that trades the usual rounded canopy for a low, dense frame of ten to twelve feet. The elegant, pinnate compound leaves and the showy summer panicles of small, bright yellow flowers are all present, simply gathered into a modest footprint that suits a small garden far better than the full species.
Among crape myrtles, Lagerstroemia fauriei is the aristocrat grown as much for bark as for bloom. A small, multi-stemmed, deciduous tree from Yakushima Island in southern Japan, first brought to botanical attention in the 1950s, the species reaches a graceful twenty-five to thirty-five feet with a rounded, vase-shaped crown. The summer flowers are white, carried in airy terminal panicles that are smaller and more delicate than the heavy trusses of the familiar Lagerstroemia indica.
