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.
Fragrance is the rarest thing in a camellia, and Camellia lutchuensis is the great exception, a species grown less for the size of the flower than for the scent that rises from it. The blooms are small, single, and white around a center of yellow stamens, carried in profusion on a twiggy, airy shrub, and they release a sweet, sometimes spicy perfume unusual in a genus famous for having almost none.
Three things to know about this camellia. First, the tea-oil camellia is the most economically important non-tea member of the genus. China has cultivated Camellia oleifera for over two thousand three hundred years for the oil pressed from the seeds, a light, sweetish, monounsaturated cooking oil chemically close to olive oil (around eighty percent oleic acid in both), used for cooking, traditional cosmetics, hair tonics, and the historic rust-proofing of Japanese woodworking tools and chef's knives. Tea oil sits with olive, palm, and coconut among the four major woody oil crops on Earth. This is a working tree.
Camellia saluenensis is not the flashiest camellia in the garden, but few have done more to shape the ones that are. This upright, densely leafy evergreen carries small, single, funnel-shaped flowers in soft pink, opening from late winter into spring, and stands as one of the two parents behind the celebrated Camellia williamsii hybrids that carried camellia growing into colder gardens.
Two Hall of Fame inductions hang on Leslie Ann's lineage, though neither is for a flower. The award stamped on her record, the Ralph Peer Sasanqua Award, carries the name of the man who in 1923 hauled recording equipment south to Atlanta and captured the first commercial sides of country and blues. Ralph Peer pioneered field recording and sits in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame, then turned that same restless curatorial instinct on camellias late in life, founding the Los Angeles Camellia Society in 1948 and rising to president of the American Camellia Society by 1957. The man who recorded the Carter Family also decided which sasanquas deserved to be remembered. In 1961, one of them was this one.
'Misty Moon' is a relatively new selection of the favorite fall-blooming sasanqua, an upright, bushy evergreen carrying large, rounded, single to semi-double flowers in a soft lavender-pink with gently wavy petals. The fading flowers do something unusual, taking on a cool grayish-blue cast before the petals drop, the detail that earns the name. Woodlanders has grown 'Misty Moon' in the ground for many years here in Aiken, and the old-nursery specimen has become a real showstopper just as the rest of the garden winds down for the year.
Camellia 'California Dawn' brings together two very different parents to make a large, generous flower for the far end of the year. A cross between the autumn-blooming Japanese Camellia sasanqua and the big, tender, large-flowered Camellia reticulata of Yunnan, this hybrid opens wide light-pink blooms, semi-double to loose peony form, the petals crimped and waved like crepe paper. The flowers arrive in fall and early winter, when the garden has mostly finished, and this camellia has grown and performed well in the Woodlanders garden.
'Rosea' is a pink-flowered form of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis, the same species behind every cup of green, black, white, and oolong tea, here carrying soft pink flowers in place of the usual white and a reddish flush through the new foliage. The leaves still make tea, so this is an ornamental and a useful plant at once, a little prettier in flower than the straight species and just as willing in the garden.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
4–8 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
Castanea pumila, the American chinquapin or Allegheny chinkapin, is a deciduous large shrub or small tree native to the eastern and southeastern United States. Long admired by rural foragers and old-time orchardists, this relatively rare native once flourished across the South, where children filled their pockets with the spiny burrs and the sweet, nutty treasure inside.
Buttonbush is a rounded, deciduous native shrub, easily trained as a small multi-stemmed tree, grown for the curious globe-shaped flowers that give the plant its name. From early summer into fall, creamy-white pincushion balls about an inch across stud the branches, each a sphere of tiny tubular flowers with projecting styles that lend a fireworks effect, intensely fragrant and alive with bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
Hardiness
Zones 5–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, general wellness, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications
In the dead of winter, when the garden has given up on color and scent alike, Chimonanthus praecox quietly does the impossible. On bare, leafless branches, often in January and February, the wintersweet opens small, waxy, cupped stars of translucent pale yellow, each flushed at the heart with maroon, and from them pours a fragrance so rich and far-carrying that a single sprig will perfume a room. The Chinese name, la mei, the wax plum, catches the look of the petals exactly.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
12–15 ft.
Spread
8–10 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, general wellness, mental & emotional well-being
Chitalpa tashkentensis is a plant with a passport, an intergeneric hybrid that pairs the American desert willow, Chilopsis linearis, with a catalpa, and carries the frilled trumpet flowers of one parent on the willowy, drought-hardy frame of the other. The name itself is a splice, Chilopsis joined to Catalpa, while tashkentensis records the birthplace, the botanical garden at Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, where the cross was raised in the 1960s. From that single Central Asian introduction descend the chitalpas grown across America today.
The Ponderosa lemon is grown for spectacle as much as for the kitchen. The fruits are enormous, often two to four pounds each, thick-skinned and gloriously bumpy, hanging like green-gold cannonballs among the glossy leaves. For all the size, the flesh is tart, juicy, and true lemon in flavor, and works in any recipe a regular lemon would, with the novelty of a single fruit that can fill a hand.
The Rangpur is not truly a lime at all, but Indian gardeners have used the fruit as one for more than five hundred years. Citrus x limonia, an old natural hybrid of mandarin and citron, bears small, round, deep orange fruits that look like tangerines and taste fiercely sour, with the aromatic bite that makes a fine lime substitute for cooking, cocktails, and marmalade. In India the fruit goes by surkh nimboo, the red lime, prized for exactly that intense, tart juice.
Among the very first of the citranges, Citrus 'Rusk' dates to 1897, when Walter Swingle crossed a Ruby orange with the tough, cold-hardy trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, in the great effort to breed citrus that could take a freeze. The result is a vigorous, tall-growing, notably hardy tree, evergreen to semi-evergreen, and dense with the distinctive three-parted trifoliate leaves.
Named for Walter Tennyson Swingle, the pioneering citrus breeder who spent his career crossing tender oranges with the iron-hardy trifoliate orange, the Swingle citrumelo is among the toughest citrus hybrids ever raised. A cross of grapefruit, Citrus paradisi, and trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, this vigorous, thorny, semi-evergreen shrub or small tree carries fragrant white citrus blossoms in spring, followed by pear-shaped yellow fruits about the size of a large orange.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the Troyer citrange is a classic of the kind. A cross of the Washington navel orange and the inedible but iron-hardy trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata, the Troyer was raised in 1909 under the direction of the great citrus breeder Walter Swingle, and later named for A. M. Troyer of Fairhope, Alabama, where the tree first bore fruit, a nice southern footnote for a hardy citrus.
Woodlanders has long led in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and U.S. 119 is one of the most refined of the group. A complex USDA hybrid, a citrumelo crossed back with a sweet orange, the tree runs one quarter trifoliate orange, one quarter grapefruit, and one half sweet orange, a pedigree chosen to keep the toughness of the trifoliate while pushing the fruit toward genuine quality.
US-942 began life as a rootstock, bred by the USDA and released in 2010 after years of Florida field trials, a careful cross of the Sunki mandarin and the curious Flying Dragon form of trifoliate orange, Poncirus trifoliata. As a rootstock the record is stellar: compact, productive trees, strong resistance to Phytophthora and tristeza virus, and better tolerance of citrus greening than most, which is why growers across the citrus belt have come to trust the number.
The sour orange is grown across the warm world as an ornamental and even a street tree, and stands somewhat naturalized in Florida. The fruit is famous for marmalade and useful little else, since the flesh is fiercely sour and bitter, not for eating out of hand. This particular unnamed selection has a Woodlanders story: we propagated the tree from a single specimen found growing on the edge of an abandoned sandy field in a remote corner of Appling County, Georgia, with no house anywhere near. What drew us was the crop, abundant, large, and very showy, loose-skinned and easy to peel.
Among the more intriguing fruits in the Woodlanders citrus collection, the Gou Tou sour orange stands apart, not only for rarity but for a rare combination of hardiness, heavy fruiting, and surprisingly pleasant flavor. Widely cultivated in Southeast Asia, Citrus aurantium 'Gou Tou' carries the form of a traditional bitter orange but with a taste that leans toward grapefruit, which makes this one of the most palatable sour oranges a gardener outside the subtropics can grow.
