866 plants in this collection
Think of this as a living blueprint. The Southern Structure Kit brings together six bold, beautiful, and botanically significant plants that offer backbone, texture, and seasonal brilliance to the Southeastern landscape. These plugs aren't fleeting fillers — they are the shrubs and perennials that define borders, screen views, feed birds, and turn heads.
The Thomasville citrangequat is more than a fruit tree, a living piece of Southern horticultural history. First fruited in Thomasville, Georgia, this remarkable hybrid was raised in 1909 by the legendary USDA citrus breeder Walter T. Swingle and formally named in 1923. The tree stands as a pioneering achievement in citrus breeding: a three-way cross combining the cold-hardy Willits citrange, itself a cross of sweet orange and trifoliate orange, with the Nagami kumquat, Fortunella margarita.
A dwarf form of one of Japan's legendary Five Sacred Trees of Kiso, the goboku no kinbatsu, a select group of conifers protected by feudal law for centuries, reserved for imperial residences and temple construction, where commoners caught poaching the wood faced execution. The species, Thujopsis dolabrata, is endemic to Japan and known there as asunaro, a name that translates beautifully and a little wistfully as tomorrow it will become hinoki, a nod to the tree's resemblance to the more revered hinoki cypress, forever almost but not quite the more famous tree. Thujopsis is the sole species in the entire genus.
Tibouchina urvilleana, the princess flower or glory bush, is a Brazilian subtropical grown for some of the most saturated purple flowers in the garden. Soft, velvety, prominently veined leaves clothe the arching stems, and against that green the large, five-petaled, royal-purple blooms, each with a spray of curved violet stamens, seem almost to glow. In all but essentially frost-free areas the shrub grows as a dieback perennial, returning from the roots each spring.
American basswood is one of the great shade and honey trees of eastern North America, a fast, stately deciduous tree with large, heart-shaped, softly toothed leaves and a broad, rounded, generous crown. Tilia americana has been cherished by Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and naturalists alike, and goes by a string of names: linden, bee tree, and lime, though the tree is no relation to the citrus lime. In late spring and early summer, hanging clusters of pale yellow, sweetly fragrant flowers open and hum with bees.
Stinking Cedar is a beautiful conifer despite the name. The foliage actually smells pleasant! It is a medium size pyramidal evergreen tree with Yew-like leaves and purple nutmeg-like fruit on female plants. Needs light organic soil, adequate moisture and part shade. This very rare conifer is native to a very limited area on the Apalachicola River in northwest Florida and adjacent Georgia where it is now almost extinct. It is a FEDERALLY LISTED ENDANGERED SPECIES. CANNOT BE SOLD IN INTERSTATE COMMERCE.
'Ogon Nishiki' is Asian star jasmine dressed for a festival. New leaves break coppery orange and scarlet, then settle through gold and cream into a marbled patchwork of green, yellow and orange, so an established plant carries three or four colors at once and shifts them with the season. Cold weather pushes the older foliage toward red. The leaves are small, thick and evergreen on wiry stems, and the effect from across a garden is less like a variegated vine than like a slow fire moving over the ground.
Confederate jasmine, or star jasmine, is one of the best-loved evergreen vines of the warm South, prized for glossy dark leaves and clouds of small, star-shaped, intensely fragrant flowers. The common form wears white blooms, but this selection, which Woodlanders offers as 'Mandianum' and which may be the cultivar 'Star of Toscana', opens flowers in shades of creamy to clear yellow, an unusual and welcome color in the tribe.
This variegated form of Confederate jasmine, or star jasmine, is grown as much for the foliage as the flowers. Each leathery, evergreen leaf is bordered and splashed with creamy white, often flushed pink in cool weather, and the leaves run larger than on most forms of Trachelospermum jasminoides, so the vine reads as a soft, marbled cloud of green and cream on a fence or trellis even out of bloom.
'Madison' is the cold-hardy Confederate jasmine, the selection that carries the beloved evergreen vine a full zone north of where the tribe usually stops. Vigorous and twining, with glossy dark leaves and the powerfully fragrant, white, star-shaped flowers that make star jasmine famous, this form has proved hardy into USDA zone 7, well beyond the reach of the standard Trachelospermum jasminoides.
Tricyrtis is a small genus of woodland lilies from the Himalayas and eastern Asia, and this plant, almost certainly Tricyrtis formosana, carries the whole strange charm of the group in a single late-season flower. The botanical name joins the Greek treis, three, with kyrtos, humped or swollen, for the three little nectar sacs that bulge at the base of each bloom, a detail worth crouching down to find. The species epithet formosana points to Formosa, the old name for Taiwan, where these toad lilies grow on shaded, humus-rich slopes. The common name is the odd one: garden lore holds that hunters of the Philippine forests once rubbed the flowers' juice on their hands to make frogs and toads easier to grab, and the freckled, amphibian mottling of the petals has kept the name ever since.
Tripterygium regelii is a big, rambling, almost vine-like shrub from the temperate woodlands of Japan, Korea, and Manchuria, closely related to the celebrated thunder god vine of Chinese medicine. The genus name is a piece of plain description: from the Greek treis, three, and pteryx, a wing, for the papery three-winged fruits that hang in pale green clusters after flowering. The species honors Eduard von Regel, the nineteenth-century botanist who directed the St. Petersburg botanical garden. The English name, Regel's threewingnut, keeps both the man and the winged nutlet in view.
Botanists now file this hemlock under Tsuga dumosa, the Himalayan hemlock, though the tree reached American gardens, and reached us, as Tsuga yunnanensis. The two names describe one tree seen from opposite ends of a very long range: dumosa, meaning bushy, from the Nepalese and Bhutanese end, and yunnanensis from the Chinese. Kew's Plants of the World Online treats the Yunnan name as a synonym, so the accepted name comes first here and the old one stays in parentheses, because that is the name most people will be searching for.
Tulbaghia violacea, the plant gardeners know as society garlic, is a clump-forming perennial from the summer-dry grasslands of southern Africa, ranging from the Little Karoo through the Eastern Cape to KwaZulu-Natal. The genus honors Ryk Tulbagh, the eighteenth-century Dutch governor of the Cape of Good Hope, while the species name violacea simply means violet, for the color of the flowers. The common name is a small joke: the leaves carry a clear garlic scent, but a gentler, more sociable one than true garlic, said to be polite enough for company.
Ugni molinae, the Chilean guava, is a small evergreen shrub of the myrtle family, native to the temperate forests of Chile and adjoining southern Argentina. Gardeners of an older generation will know the plant as Myrtus ugni, the name the shrub long circulated under. The genus name Ugni comes straight from uñi, the Mapuche word for the plant, while the species honors Juan Ignacio Molina, the Jesuit naturalist who first chronicled the flora of Chile; in the plant's homeland the shrub is simply murta or murtilla.
Vaccinium arboreum, the sparkleberry, is the giant of the blueberry clan, a large shrub or small tree native across the southeastern and south-central United States, from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas. The species name arboreum means tree-like, and an old specimen earns it, rising to twenty or twenty-five feet on a gnarled, contorted frame. The folk names sparkleberry and farkleberry both nod to the small, glossy, glinting black fruits, and the plant is sometimes called tree huckleberry or winter huckleberry for the leaves that linger late.
Sold as a 3-gallon plant, pick up only.
Sold as a 3-gallon plant, pick up only.
A large evergreen shrub with glossy leaves, reaching six to twelve feet in time and occasionally more, with the leathery, polished foliage that sets the evergreen blueberries apart from their deciduous relatives. New growth flushes bronze to red before hardening to dark green. White urn-shaped flowers hang in short racemes in early summer, each cluster subtended by the leafy bracts that give the species its name, and are followed by small dark berries, edible and mildly sweet. The habit is dense and rounded, useful year-round in a way that a highbush blueberry never manages. Our plants were struck from cuttings taken at the old Woodlanders site, off stock that has been growing here in Aiken for many years.
Sold as a 3-gallon plant, pick up only.
