The flora of a whole continent, grown for the garden. This collection gathers the trees, shrubs, vines, and wildflowers native to North America, plants that evolved here alongside the birds, bees, and butterflies that still depend on them.
Muhly grass is a distinctive ornamental, a wiry upright bunch grass that spends most of the year as an unremarkable tuft of narrow foliage and then, in late summer and fall, throws up a haze of flowering panicles so fine and so numerous that the whole plant appears to be smoking. The normal form does this in reddish pink. 'White Cloud' is a rare selection that does it in white, and the effect is entirely different: cooler, more luminous, and startling when backlit by a low sun. Plumes reach three to four feet. Set against a dark background, an evergreen hedge or a stand of pine, the white reads as light rather than as color, and mixed among the ordinary pink form the two together are better than either alone.
Muhlenbergia dumosa, bamboo muhly, is a desert-born grass with the grace of bamboo, drifting like cloud shadow across the canyon floor. From the arid uplands and rocky washes of northern Mexico and southern Arizona, where sun-scorched cliffs and canyon walls shaped the character of the species, bamboo muhly evolved to thrive on dry air and lean soils, and yet carries the fluid elegance of true bamboo, swaying at the faintest breeze.
Southern wax myrtle is one of the hardest-working native evergreens of the Southeast, and 'Emperor' is a nursery selection of that adaptable shrub. Fast-growing and densely branched, wax myrtle forms a large evergreen shrub or a small multi-trunked tree, clothed in narrow, olive-green leaves that release a clean, spicy, bayberry scent when crushed. The plant thrives where many shrubs fail, from wet ground to dry sand, in sun or shade, on the coast or inland. Our propagation material comes from Hopelands Gardens, a few minutes from the nursery here in Aiken, where a grand old specimen still leans at the angle Helene left in 2024, root plate heaved half out of the ground and better than half the trunk buried. The tree has carried on growing from that new posture without missing a season, in a garden that lost old pines, deodar cedars and magnolias outright, which says more about the constitution of wax myrtle than any list of virtues could.
Alabama snow-wreath is one of the Southeast's rarest native shrubs and one of the easiest to grow, a combination that ought to put the plant in far more gardens than it occupies. In spring the arching, thicket-forming branches foam with feathery white flowers, and the trick of them is that there are no petals at all: the show is pure stamen, dozens of white filaments per bloom spraying out against five small greenish sepals, like little bottlebrushes of light along the stems.
Nyssa ogeche, the Ogeechee tupelo, is a medium-sized deciduous tree of the southeastern Coastal Plain, at home from southern South Carolina through the Ogeechee valley of Georgia into northern Florida and Alabama. The genus name honors Nyssa, a water nymph of Greek myth, and the tree lives up to the name, thriving along creeks, river swamps, and seasonally flooded bottoms where the soil stays acidic and wet.
Sundrops make a gentle joke of their family. Oenothera fruticosa ssp. glauca belongs to the evening primroses, a tribe famous for opening at dusk and closing by mid-morning, yet the sundrops break ranks and bloom by day, holding cups of clear, satiny yellow wide open through the sunlit hours of late spring and early summer. The genus name comes from the Greek oinos, wine, and thera, to hunt or seek, an old and disputed reference to a European relative whose roots were once thought to give a taste for wine; the epithet fruticosa means shrubby, for the firm, upright stems, and glauca notes the blue-green bloom on the foliage.
Osmunda regalis, the royal fern, is a plant of stature and quiet nobility, at home where the woods remember water and time moves slowly. The genus Osmunda gives its name to an ancient family, the Osmundaceae, sometimes called the flowering ferns, with a fossil lineage that reaches back past the Jurassic; a royal fern in the garden is a living relic of a far older flora. The natural range runs from Nova Scotia to Florida in North America, and on through Europe, Africa, and Asia, making this one of the most widely distributed ferns on earth. Both the common name and the Latin regalis salute the same quality: among the largest and most robust of all North American herbaceous plants, the royal fern reaches four to six feet where truly content.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
3–6 ft.
Spread
3–4 ft.
Plant type
Fern
Traditional use
pain relief, topical applications, respiratory support
Oxydendrum arboreum, the sourwood, is one of the loveliest and most distinctive trees of the Eastern American woods, and among the very last to flower each year. The name tells the story twice over: Oxydendrum joins the Greek oxys, sour or sharp, and dendron, tree, while the common name echoes the same tang, for the leaves, twigs, and bark all taste sourly of oxalic acid when chewed. A member of the heath family alongside azaleas, rhododendrons, and blueberries, sourwood stands alone as the sole species in the genus, native to well-drained, acid woodland soils from southern Pennsylvania to the Florida panhandle and west toward Louisiana, most abundant in the lower Appalachians.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
30–50 ft.
Spread
15–25 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
Few native plants look as improbable as the maypop. Passiflora incarnata, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast, opens intricate three-inch flowers of pale lavender and white, each ringed with a fringed corona of wavy filaments above a central column of stamens and styles. Spanish missionaries read the whole Passion of Christ into that structure, the corona for the crown of thorns, the five anthers for the wounds, the three styles for the nails, and gave the genus its devotional name. Common along field edges and roadsides from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, the vine climbs by curling tendrils or sprawls across open ground.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–25 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
Passiflora incarnata alba is the rare pure white form of the native maypop, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast. The flower keeps all the improbable structure of the species, an intricate three-inch bloom with a fringed corona above a central column of stamens and styles, but drained of every trace of lavender: white petals, white sepals, and a white corona, luminous and cool against the deep green foliage. The effect is a ghostly, refined version of a familiar roadside wildflower.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–15 ft.
Spread
3–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
This rare Penstemon is a very attractive perennial with deeply cut, fern-like leaves and tall spikes of pinkish-violet flowers, each two-lipped tube carrying the yellow-bearded sterile stamen that gives the genus the name beardtongue. The dissected foliage is not merely a nice feature; it is unique in the entire genus, and no other Penstemon anywhere in the world has leaves like these. Bloom comes in late spring on stems of a foot to two, held well above a low basal clump.
Small's beardtongue is one of the showiest and most obliging of the eastern native penstemons, a Southern Appalachian wildflower that carries tall spires of lavender-pink to rosy-purple tubular flowers in late spring and holds them for weeks. Each bloom is pale-throated and finely striped inside, a landing-strip for the bumblebees that work the flowers, and the whole plant rises from a handsome rosette of purple-veined foliage on reddish stems.
Phlox carolina 'Kim' is among the best of the Carolina phloxes, a selection found by the plantswoman Jan Midgley in Alabama and grown ever since for good health and honest flower power. From a low, tidy clump of narrow, almost lime-green leaves rise sturdy stems eighteen to twenty-four inches tall, each carrying an open, airy cluster of pale to bright pink flowers, five petals apiece, hovering just above the foliage from late spring into early summer. Where the border phloxes so often finish the season spotted and tired, 'Kim' holds clean, fresh foliage from spring straight through fall.
Wild blue phlox turned up in the Woodlanders catalog almost by insisting on it, growing in the woods around Aiken the way the plant has for as long as anyone can remember. We have watched these colonies for years, and taking this long to offer them is either a comment on our patience or on our woody bias. Possibly both.
'Shortwood' is one of the best of the tall garden phloxes, a strong pink that stands up straight and blooms for weeks in the heart of summer. Each large, domed panicle is packed with fragrant flowers, clear rose-pink around a deeper magenta eye, and the whole plant reads from across the garden, four feet of upright color that never seems to flop.
Phlox pilosa, the downy or prairie phlox, is a native of open woods, prairies, and glades across much of the eastern and central United States, and 'Eco Happy Traveler' is one of the most rewarding garden selections, made for a spreading habit and a long run of clear rose-pink bloom. The soft, downy stems and narrow leaves give the plant the common name, and the whole low mat is topped in late spring by loose clusters of fragrant, five-petaled flowers.
Physostegia virginiana, the obedient plant, is a familiar native of moist meadows and streamsides across eastern North America, and 'Vivid' is the compact, richly colored selection that has become a garden standard. Upright spikes of deep rose-pink, tubular flowers rise on square, mint-family stems in mid to late summer, holding strong color into early fall when much of the border is fading.
Pieris phillyreifolia, the climbing fetterbush, is one of the strangest and most wonderful of Southeastern natives, an evergreen member of the heath family with a habit unlike any other hardy shrub. In cultivation the plant grows as a neat, small evergreen shrub of two to three feet, clothed in narrow, leathery dark green leaves about an inch long.
Pinckneya is a large shrub or small deciduous tree with showy pink flowers that are not flowers at all. What carries the colour is a single enlarged sepal on some of the blooms, expanded into a soft rose-pink blade three or four inches long, so a tree in full display looks convincingly like a poinsettia that has escaped into a Georgia bog. The true flowers are smaller, greenish-yellow, tubular, and easy to overlook beside the bracts. The leaves are oval and four to five inches long, and the whole plant is loose and open rather than dense.
A spring-blooming native of the eastern woodlands, found from Ontario and Quebec south through the Appalachians and as far west as Minnesota and Oklahoma, growing on rich deciduous forest floors, along streambanks, and at the bases of sandstone canyons. Polemonium reptans is one of those native plants that rewards close attention. The leaves are pinnately compound, with seven to twenty-one paired leaflets running up each stem like the rungs of a ladder, the source of the common name, which gestures all the way back to the biblical Jacob and his dream of a stairway to heaven. The genus name is older still: Polemonium honors King Polemon of Pontus, an ancient Greek ruler with a side interest in herbalism.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications, general wellness
