The middle storey of the garden, built to last. Large shrubs bridge the gap between the canopy and the ground, giving height, screening, and year-round substance without the scale or wait of a full tree.
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.
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 fraterna is a camellia stripped back to wild beginnings, a species from the hills of eastern China far removed from the big, blowsy blooms of the garden japonicas and sasanquas. Where those carry a few large flowers, this one covers slender, upright branches in a snowfall of small, single, white flowers, faintly pink outside and softly fragrant, that arch the stems with their sheer number. The small, pointed evergreen leaves and open, airy habit give the plant an easy, natural grace.
Camellia gigantocarpa is a rare and remarkable species from the subtropical forests of southern China, first documented in the wild in the 1980s in Guangxi Province. The name says the essential thing: gigantocarpa, giant fruit. Where most camellias are grown for flowers, this species is prized above all for the great woody seed capsules that follow them, among the largest in the entire genus.
High in the shaded ravines of Hong Kong's Tai Mo Shan, a single camellia tree stood unrecognized until 1955, when the Agricultural, Fisheries and Conservation Department documented an unexpected beauty among the undergrowth. The botanist J. R. Sealy soon described a new species and named the tree Camellia granthamiana, honoring the then-Governor Sir Alexander Grantham.
'Julia Mackintosh' is a Woodlanders introduction with a family story behind the name. A chance Camellia sasanqua seedling that came up here at the nursery, the plant was selected and propagated by George Mitchell and named for the late Julia Mackintosh, who with her husband Robert founded Woodlanders. The parentage is unrecorded, though the flowers point to 'Leslie Ann', one of the nursery's long-time favorites, as the likely mother.
The United States National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. sits on 446 acres of rolling ground above the Anacostia River, a place where serious horticultural work has gone on quietly for the better part of a century. Camellia japonica 'Anacostia' takes both the name and the pedigree from that institution, selected at the Arboretum for cold hardiness and reliable performance at the northern edge of camellia country.
To see what a camellia can become when it is left happy for decades, look no farther than 'Greensboro Red'. At the original Woodlanders nursery site, this cultivar has grown into a remarkable hedgerow some fifteen feet tall over more than thirty years, a living reminder that camellias are not merely shrubs but legacy plants. Robert Mackintosh planted that first hedgerow in the early 1970s, from stock acquired at a small local nursery here in Aiken, South Carolina.
'Imura' is a refined white form of Camellia japonica, grown for elegant semi-double pure white flowers set against narrow, glossy evergreen leaves. The clean white bloom and slightly fine-textured foliage give the plant a quiet, luminous presence in shade, a contrast to the heavier reds and pinks that dominate the genus.
'Tama no ura' is among the most celebrated of all wild-found camellias, and the story is part of the plant. In 1947 a charcoal worker came upon a single old Camellia japonica, by repute some two hundred years old, growing deep in the forest near Tamanoura on Fukue Island in the Goto archipelago, off Nagasaki. The flowers stopped him: single, bright red, and edged crisply in white, a clean picotee never before recorded in the wild. Selected and propagated from that one tree, the camellia was exhibited in Nagasaki in 1973 and carried to America by Nuccio's Nursery in 1975.
A camellia with a story we can only half tell. Years ago a plant was dropped at the nursery in Aiken, left for a friend to carry home to Korea. The pickup never came, and the plant stayed; the label, somewhere in the years that followed, was lost. We propagated her anyway, because she was too good to let slip, and because she has the particular bone structure of a real cultivar. Someone, somewhere, named her.
Camellia 'Brian' is a handsome evergreen with showy, cyclamen-pink, semi-double flowers carried over a faint silvery cast, opening in late winter on a compact, upright frame. As best the nursery can determine, the plant is a Camellia reticulata by Camellia japonica hybrid, drawing the larger flower and silvered sheen of the reticulata side together with the hardiness and tidy habit of the japonicas.
