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.
'Millie Mac' is a wild-selected native azalea from the damp hollows of Escambia County, Alabama, where Floyd McConnell found this plant as a distinctive limb sport on a wild shrub and propagated it for a beauty all its own. Related to the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, the selection shows white-margined flowers that hint at a touch of R. canescens in the background, and the lineage remains a matter of pleasant debate among native-azalea growers.
'Reagan' is a richly colored selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen in the wild in Florida near the Apalachicola River, the great blackwater river whose ravines shelter some of the Southeast's rarest plants. Where the typical Florida azalea runs to clear gold and orange, this form pairs yellow petals with deep reddish-pink buds and flower tubes, so that from a distance the whole shrub takes on a warm, red-flushed glow uncommon in the species.
'Varnadoe's Moonbeam' is a luminous early-spring selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, prized for a soft, glowing color less common in the species. Rather than the fiery orange of many forms, the flowers open in clear golden yellow brushed with apricot and orange in the throat, over reddish tubes, a warm but refined coloring that seems to catch and hold the light, moonlit rather than blazing, against the still-bare spring woodland.
This is a rare and radiant selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen for flowers of pure, clear yellow. Where the species usually runs to golden-orange, this form holds a clean, buttery, luminous yellow, a color that lights up the spring woodland like sunshine slipping through the canopy. For gardeners and collectors who love the native azaleas, a truly pure-yellow austrinum is an uncommon prize.
Flame azalea is the showiest of all the native azaleas, and the one that stops hikers in their tracks on the Appalachian balds each June. The large, funnel-shaped flowers open in a fiery range that runs from clear yellow through gold and apricot to blazing orange and scarlet, carried in loose trusses just as the new leaves expand. For all that color the flowers are, unusually, without scent, but nothing about a flame azalea in full bloom feels the lack.
Rhododendron canescens, the Piedmont azalea, is very likely the most widespread of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Southeast, ranging through the Piedmont, coastal plain, and stream edges from the mid-Atlantic to the Gulf. Country people have long called the plant the Southern pinxter or simply wild honeysuckle, for the sweet, honeysuckle-like scent of the flowers. The species name canescens means becoming gray or hoary, a reference to the soft gray down that coats the undersides of the leaves and the new growth.
'Clyo Red' is a striking red-flowered selection of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, a species usually seen in soft pink and white. Here the wild pink is deepened to a rich cherry-red, an uncommon and eye-catching tone among the native azaleas, carried on the same fragrant, early-spring frame that makes the Piedmont azalea so beloved. The name points to Clyo, a small community in Effingham County, Georgia, near the plant's Southern home.
'Varnadoe's Pink' is a choice dark-pink selection of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, chosen and grown by the late Aaron Varnadoe of Colquitt, Georgia, a great native-azalea grower and genuine Southern character. Where the wild species varies from pale to deep pink, this selection holds a rich, abundant dark pink, and the plant has become a popular favorite for that reliable color and a good habit and foliage. The selection is sometimes sold under the name 'Varnadoe's Phlox Pink'.
Rhododendron colemanii, the Red Hills azalea, is one of the most recently recognized of all the native deciduous azaleas, first described as a distinct species only in 2008. For years the plant was folded in with the Alabama azalea, Rhododendron alabamense, which blooms earlier and holds consistently white, yellow-blotched flowers; the Red Hills azalea, by contrast, flowers later and in a wider range of color. The species takes its home ground from the Red Hills country of the inner coastal plain, a narrow range across southwest Georgia and southern Alabama.
The Oconee azalea is the flame azalea of the lowlands, and for a Southern gardener that difference matters. Where the mountain flame azalea pines for cool Appalachian summers, this Piedmont cousin was born to the heat, thriving in the clay hills and stream bluffs of middle Georgia and South Carolina and taking the humidity of the Deep South in stride. The reward is the same fire in the flower: bright orange to orange-red trusses, sometimes shading to salmon or gold, opening in mid-spring.
Pinxterbloom is the wild azalea of the eastern woods, a hardy native that hangs its soft pink flowers along the branches in mid-spring, just before the leaves catch up. The funnel-shaped blooms, pale pink to nearly white, throw long curving stamens well past the petals, giving the whole shrub a hazy, spidery lightness, and carry a faint sweet scent on a warm day. Few native shrubs say spring so plainly.
Among the most beloved of the eastern wild azaleas, Rhododendron periclymenoides drifts through the open woods and swamp margins of the eastern United States from New Hampshire and Massachusetts south to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, opening clouds of pink bloom just as the woodland wakes in spring. This selection breaks from the ordinary pink of the species: a soft lavender-purple color form discovered in Lancaster County, South Carolina, and introduced by Woodlanders, uncommon in the wild and rarer still in cultivation. Botanists once filed the species under the name Rhododendron nudiflorum, and the plant still answers to that older label in many an old garden book.
The native deciduous azaleas of the southeastern United States bloom in a long relay, from the pinxters and Piedmont azaleas of March through the flame azaleas of April and May and on into July with the red of Rhododendron prunifolium. And then, once most gardeners have closed the azalea chapter for the year, Rhododendron serrulatum opens. Hammocksweet azalea is the last of the line, flowering in August and September and sometimes later still.
The swamp azalea, Rhododendron viscosum, ordinarily opens white; this selection breaks pink. 'Roseum' is a rose-flushed form of the familiar native, chosen and introduced by Woodlanders from a plant of Aiken County, South Carolina provenance, a home-ground selection that carries the sweet, clove-like fragrance of the species in a warmer color. The swamp azalea ranges widely across the eastern United States, from the Gulf Coast north into New England, threading the wet margins of swamps, bogs, and stream banks where few other flowering shrubs will follow.
The glaucous swamp azalea is a native deciduous shrub of the wetland South and the eastern seaboard, a blue-leaved form of Rhododendron viscosum, the widespread swamp azalea that ranges from the Gulf Coast north into New England. The variety glaucum sets the plant apart with foliage washed in a soft blue-green, most striking on the leaf undersides, which flash pale as a breeze turns them. Where many shrubs falter, this azalea thrives in the consistently moist, even boggy ground of swamps, marshes, and stream banks.
Fragrant sumac is a versatile deciduous shrub native across much of the eastern and central United States, where the plant threads scattered woodlands, rocky slopes, and open banks. The trifoliate leaves, often mistaken at a glance for poison oak, are entirely harmless, and a crushed leaf releases the clean, lemony-resinous scent that gives the plant every one of the common names, from fragrant sumac to skunkbush, depending on the nose. The genus name Rhus is the old Greek and Latin word for the sumacs, and the epithet aromatica names the scent directly.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Rudbeckia nitida is a tall, luminous coneflower that trades the coarse hairiness of the common black-eyed Susans for smooth, glossy, dark green leaves and hairless stems, the shining foliage that gives the species a name. From a leafy base rise slender stems three to five feet tall, each carrying a large yellow daisy whose soft rays droop back from a raised, greenish-brown central cone, blooming through the heat of mid to late summer.
Ruellia caroliniensis, the Carolina wild petunia, is a modest, long-blooming native that carries far more ecological weight than the quiet flowers suggest. From early summer into fall, a steady succession of lavender to violet-purple trumpets, each an inch or two across and lasting only a single day, opens along upright stems a foot or two high, replaced faithfully the next morning so that the plant is seldom out of bloom for months on end.
Sabal 'Birmingham' is one of the hardiest fan palms an American gardener can grow, and the palm owes its survival to Woodlanders. Well-established specimens come through USDA Zone 7, deep into country where an ordinary cabbage palm needs coddling and near-perfect siting just to limp along. Broad, costapalmate, deep green fronds rise on a stout, slowly building trunk, giving the unmistakable palm silhouette hundreds of miles north of where the family usually stops.
Sabal etonia, the scrub palmetto, is a small fan palm found nowhere in the world but Florida, where the palm is a signature of the sand pine scrub, most abundantly along the ancient dunes of the Lake Wales Ridge. The specific epithet etonia comes from the Etonia scrub of Putnam County, the country where the species was first collected, so the botanical name carries a Florida place with it.
