{"title":"Coming Spring 2027","description":"\u003cp\u003eSpring is the loud season, the one every catalog points at, and these are the plants we are growing toward it a year out. Cuttings stuck this year and seedlings coming along now will spend the intervening seasons sizing up so that they arrive ready for the planting rush, not a moment sooner. There is a particular pleasure in claiming a plant this early, before the spring scramble, and simply waiting. Put your name on the ones you want and let the year do the growing.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"acer-griseum","title":"Acer griseum","description":"\u003cp\u003eFew trees carry a collector's story as plainly as the paperbark maple. Ernest Henry Wilson gathered seed of \u003cem\u003eAcer griseum\u003c\/em\u003e in central China in 1901 for the Veitch nursery, and for most of the twentieth century nearly every paperbark grown in Western gardens traced back to that introduction and one that followed. The maple sets abundant winged samaras, yet most are empty, a parthenocarpic habit that leaves only a small fraction viable. That quirk is why the species has always been scarce, slow to propagate, and quietly treasured wherever a good specimen takes hold.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe bark is the glory of the tree. Within two or three years the trunk and larger limbs begin to shed in papery curls of cinnamon to coppery red brown, and the peeling layers cling rather than fall, catching low winter light until the whole canopy seems lit from within. Three-part leaves, blue green through summer, turn scarlet and orange before dropping, while the small greenish yellow spring flowers pass almost unnoticed, content to leave the bark and the autumn fire to carry the season.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSlow and well mannered, the paperbark maple settles at twenty to thirty feet with a rounded, oval crown, a scale that suits a small lawn, a courtyard, or the corner of a mixed border. Site this maple where the trunk can be read at close range, beside a path, a patio, or a window framed for winter, and give the bark a dark backdrop of evergreens to play against. Adaptable to clay and to both acid and alkaline ground, the tree asks only for reasonable drainage and a few patient years of watering to establish.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"1 Gallon","offer_id":42961950474355,"sku":"ACER-GRIS-01G","price":31.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"1 Quart","offer_id":42961950507123,"sku":"ACER-GRIS-01Q","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/AcergriseumWoodlanders-3.jpg?v=1750637242"},{"product_id":"aloysia-virgata","title":"Aloysia virgata","description":"\u003cp\u003eSweet almond verbena is grown for one glorious thing above all: scent. From midsummer until hard frost, \u003cem\u003eAloysia virgata\u003c\/em\u003e tips every branch with slender spikes of small white flowers that pour out an intoxicating vanilla-almond fragrance, strongest in the late afternoon and evening and carrying clear across a garden. Butterflies and hummingbirds work the spikes all season.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA vigorous, shrubby plant native to Argentina, sweet almond verbena can be trained as a small multi-stemmed tree in subtropical gardens or grown as a dieback shrub farther north, cut to the ground by winter and returning from the roots in spring. The dark green leaves are sandpapery to the touch, and the loose, open frame reaches eight to fifteen feet where the season is long.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGive sweet almond verbena a sunny spot with well-drained soil, near a path, a patio, or an open window where the evening perfume can be enjoyed. Drought tolerant once established and seldom troubled by deer, the shrub pairs well with other pollinator plants in a sunny border. In zones 8 and 9 expect a return from the roots after a hard winter; farther south, a standing small tree.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAdditional photo courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057808773235,"sku":"ALOY-VIRG-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/B30C7994-8D13-4A88-885A-4937093B7369.jpg?v=1787795594"},{"product_id":"arbutus-x-andrachnoides","title":"Arbutus x andrachnoides","description":"\u003cp\u003eA hybrid strawberry tree, \u003cem\u003eArbutus\u003c\/em\u003e x \u003cem\u003eandrachnoides\u003c\/em\u003e crosses the strawberry tree, \u003cem\u003eArbutus unedo\u003c\/em\u003e, with the Grecian strawberry tree, \u003cem\u003eA. andrachne\u003c\/em\u003e, and takes the best of both: white, bell-shaped flowers and pink, strawberry-like fruit on a small evergreen tree, over dark green leaves an inch and a half to four inches long. The real prize comes with age, when the bark peels away to a smooth, rich red-brown that rivals any madrone.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSalt tolerant and handsome year round, this hybrid came to Woodlanders by way of Brookside Gardens in Maryland, which had obtained the plant in Europe. Slow growing and long-lived, the tree makes an elegant small specimen where the flowers, fruit, and above all the cinnamon bark can be enjoyed at close range.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive the hybrid strawberry tree full sun to part shade and well-drained soil, and a spot near a path, patio, or entry where the polished red-brown trunk can be admired. Drought and salt tolerant once established, a fine evergreen for a coastal or Mediterranean-style planting in zones 7 to 9.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057811198067,"sku":"ARBU-ANDR-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1111.jpg?v=1720136403"},{"product_id":"aronia-arbutifolia-brilliantissima","title":"Aronia arbutifolia 'Brilliantissima'","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAronia arbutifolia\u003c\/em\u003e has grown in the wet woods and pocosins of the eastern United States for a very long time, largely unbothered by the horticultural world's attention. 'Brilliantissima' changed that. Selected for foliage with a deeper gloss and berries of a more saturated, almost lacquered red than the straight species, this is the form that finally made gardeners look twice at a native shrub long overlooked despite centuries of quiet usefulness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe season opens in mid spring with clusters of small white flowers, delicate and lace-like, and welcome to native bees at a moment when little else blooms. By midsummer the berries swell and deepen, and by early autumn ripen to a red so intense as to look almost artificial against the leaves. The foliage turns at the same time: the fall color of 'Brilliantissima' is among the more reliable and spectacular events of the native shrub calendar, a deep, burnished crimson that holds for weeks and earns the cultivar name outright.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe berries persist well into winter, by which point the birds have usually found them; cedar waxwings in particular descend in flocks, either a delight or a caveat depending on attachment to the fruit display. Both views are fair.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAronia arbutifolia\u003c\/em\u003e tolerates wet soils, adapts to dry ones once established, and asks very little in return for a great deal of seasonal interest. Native, four-season, wildlife-supporting, and genuinely beautiful, a combination still rarer than it should be. The berries are edible, very astringent fresh but good cooked, and exceptionally high in antioxidants.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057812246643,"sku":"ARON-ARBU-BRIL-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/AroniaarbutifoliaBrilliantissima.jpg?v=1750800949"},{"product_id":"aster-laevis-bluebird","title":"Aster laevis ‘Bluebird’","description":"\u003cp\u003eSmooth aster is one of the cleanest and most dependable of the fall natives, and 'Bluebird' is among the best forms. \u003cem\u003eAster laevis\u003c\/em\u003e 'Bluebird' builds an upright, vase-shaped clump of smooth, blue-green foliage, then opens, in late summer and fall, sprays of violet-blue daisies centered in gold, a generous late feast for bees and butterflies as the season winds down.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA selection noted for sturdy, self-supporting stems and clean, mildew-resistant foliage that stays handsome where lesser asters tatter. Native to eastern North America, smooth aster thrives in full sun and well-drained soil, takes drought in stride once established, and asks very little. The smooth, almost waxy leaves are part of the appeal, cool blue-green all season.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePlant 'Bluebird' in a sunny border, a meadow, or a native planting, where the violet-blue haze can close the gardening year alongside goldenrod, grasses, and other late bloomers. Deer tend to leave the foliage alone, and the strong stems rarely need staking. A pollinator magnet exactly when the season's nectar runs short.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057814540403,"sku":"ASTE-LAEV-BLUE-01Q","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-606.jpg?v=1720136500"},{"product_id":"aster-grandiflorus","title":"Symphyotrichum grandiflorum","description":"\u003cp\u003eA native aster with a regional accent. Most of the asters Americans plant are wide-ranging species that turn up from Maine to Texas and read essentially the same wherever they grow. Symphyotrichum grandiflorum is more particular, with a native range small and specific: the Atlantic Coastal Plain of Virginia and the Carolinas, plus the Piedmont of the Carolinas, and little more. A few hundred miles of sandy roadsides, dry pine-oak woods, abandoned fields, and forest edges from the Tidewater into the rolling country west of the fall line. For a gardener in the Carolinas or Georgia, this is one of the few asters that is genuinely here, a piece of the actual Atlantic Coastal Plain flora rather than a borrowed prairie species filling in for a missing native.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe flower is the show. Heads an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half across, large for a wild aster, hence the species name grandiflorum, with twenty to thirty narrow ray florets in a deep, saturated violet-purple around a tight golden disk. The color carries enough blue to read cool and enough red to read warm, the kind of saturated violet that catches autumn light beautifully. The flowers open at a useful time, October into November, when most of the other asters have already finished and the garden is otherwise leaning toward seed heads, late grasses, and the first frost. Among native asters, grandiflorum is one of the latest to bloom and the largest-flowered, two genuine differentiators the more common species cannot match.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe plants stand one to three feet tall on stiff, hairy, upright stems, with narrow, lance-shaped leaves and lower clasping foliage. Not a soft, billowy, fall-flowering aster, but an upright, structural one, more architectural than romantic. Dry, sandy soils suit the plant well, and poor conditions that defeat showier perennials are taken in stride, which is part of why grandiflorum has persisted along Coastal Plain roadsides where the native communities have largely disappeared. A long list of late-season insects works the flowers, including specialist Andrena bees that depend on Symphyotrichum and a few related genera for their pollen; without late asters, these bees lose their season.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the gardener building a late-fall pollinator garden, anyone planting the actual flora of the Carolinas rather than a generic native mix, or the late-season designer wanting a structural, drought-tough, deep-purple punctuation when most other asters are spent, grandiflorum earns a place.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057815097459,"sku":"ASTE-GRAN-01Q","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Woodlanders_aster_grandiflorus_1.jpg?v=1730230236"},{"product_id":"buddleia-alternifolia","title":"Buddleia alternifolia","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBuddleia alternifolia\u003c\/em\u003e, the fountain or alternate-leaf butterfly bush, stands apart from the usual butterfly-bush crowd. A deciduous shrub native to northwestern China, the fountain butterfly bush is the most cold-hardy of the genus, and is grown above all for a weeping form and an early-season flood of fragrant, lavender-purple bloom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn shape the shrub recalls a small weeping willow, the long, arching branches cloaked in narrow, silver-green leaves set alternately, a key difference from other butterfly bushes. In late spring and early summer the branches erupt into a waterfall of softly scented blossoms, densely packed along the previous year's wood, an elegant cascade and a magnet for butterflies and bees.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBecause the flowers come on old wood, prune right after bloom to protect the next year's display. Left unpruned, the fountain butterfly bush settles into a naturally flowing eight-to-fifteen-foot fountain, a striking specimen for a cottage garden, an informal border, or a naturalistic planting. Tough and drought-tolerant once established, and reliably hardier than the modern butterfly-bush hybrids.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057818734707,"sku":"BUDD-ALTE-01G","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/0B9E2FF4-06DE-4F18-A79F-BF748D95DA4C.jpg?v=1772275407"},{"product_id":"camellia-longicarpa","title":"Camellia longicarpa","description":"\u003cp\u003eMost American gardeners know two camellias, the winter-blooming Camellia japonica and the autumn-blooming Camellia sasanqua, each in a hundred named forms. Camellia longicarpa belongs to a different and far less familiar company: the small-flowered wild camellias of section Theopsis, scarcely grown on this side of the Pacific. Woodlanders remains one of the few nurseries offering these lesser-known species to gardeners who want the wild plant rather than the show cultivar.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNative to the ravine forests of Sichuan and western Hunan, where the plant grows as an understory shrub or small tree between roughly five hundred and seventeen hundred meters, this camellia carries slender, long-tipped leaves and small, waxy, cup-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant, opening from late summer into autumn when almost no other camellia is in bloom. The name longicarpa means long-fruited, a nod to the unusually elongated seed capsule that sets the species apart from the rounder-fruited members of the group. Taxonomy here is unsettled; some botanists now treat Camellia longicarpa as a synonym of Camellia synaptica, and both names lead to the same slender white-flowered plant.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe genus honors Georg Josef Kamel, the Moravian Jesuit and pharmacist who botanized in the Philippines and whom Linnaeus chose to commemorate, though Kamel never laid eyes on a camellia. Like the rest of the clan, this species asks for the classic camellia site: dappled shade, shelter from harsh sun and drying wind, and an acidic, humus-rich soil kept moist but never waterlogged. The forest-ravine origin is the whole instruction, a plant of cool, leafy, half-lit places.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is no tea and no seed oil to claim here; despite the famous economic cousins in the genus, Camellia longicarpa is purely an ornamental for the collector and the shade garden. The reward is quieter and rarer than a japonica in full flush: fine, airy foliage on a graceful small tree, and a scatter of scented white cups in the shortening days of late summer, a camellia that flowers when the others have long since finished. For the gardener who already grows the common two and wants the wild original, this is a plant to seek out and a species to help keep in cultivation.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057824927859,"sku":"CAME-LONG-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-306.jpg?v=1720136920"},{"product_id":"carpinus-caroliniana","title":"Carpinus caroliniana","description":"\u003cp\u003eCarpinus caroliniana is a native tree that hides its best feature in plain sight, a smooth, gray, sinewy bark that ripples over the trunk like the muscles of a flexed arm, giving the common names musclewood and ironwood. This small, slow, dense understory tree of eastern North America carries fine, birch-like leaves and a rounded, layered crown. The wood beneath that muscled bark is famously hard and heavy, the reason ironwood stuck as a name.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the wild, American hornbeam grows along stream banks, floodplains, and moist woods, deep in the shade of taller trees, and belongs to the birch family alongside the hop hornbeams, hazels, and alders. The names tangle: musclewood, ironwood, blue beech, and water beech all point to this one tree, the last two for the smooth gray bark that recalls a beech. Spring brings inconspicuous green catkins, followed by small nutlets slung in leafy, hop-like clusters that feed birds and small mammals into fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhere many small trees demand sun, hornbeam thrives in shade to full sun, asking mainly for good, moist soil, and rewards the patient gardener with a clean, refined presence and fall color that runs from yellow through orange to red. The hard wood that earned the ironwood name once went into tool handles, mallets, and ox yokes, taking a horn-like polish. Slow and long-lived, this is a tree that settles in and holds its form for decades.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUse Carpinus caroliniana as a lawn or specimen tree, an understory planting beneath larger trees, or a small tree for a rain garden or damp corner where the roots run cool and moist. The dense, twiggy frame takes shearing well and lends itself to hedges and formal training, and the muscled bark carries the winter scene once the leaves have fallen. For a tough, native, shade-tolerant small tree, few match the quiet appeal of musclewood.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057827090547,"sku":"CARP-CARO-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/CarpinuscarolinianaMBG.jpg?v=1784300313"},{"product_id":"cercis-canadensis","title":"Cercis canadensis","description":"\u003cp\u003eFew native trees announce spring like Cercis canadensis, the eastern redbud, whose bare branches flush rosy pink and magenta weeks before the dogwoods open. The small pea-like flowers cluster not just along the twigs but straight from the older branches and even the trunk, a charming trick called cauliflory, and give way to broad, heart-shaped leaves. A small, graceful understory tree of eastern and central North America, redbud belongs in the legume family, kin to peas and beans.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThose early flowers do real work, offering some of the season's first nectar and pollen to native bees, among them the specialist southeastern blueberry bee and the bumblebees. The blossoms are edible too, tart and high in vitamin C, long scattered raw over salads, folded into breads and pancakes, pickled, or fried. For a few weeks each spring the whole small tree seems dipped in pink, cheerful out of all proportion to the modest size.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter the flowers come the leaves, rounded valentines that hold clean green through summer and turn soft yellow in fall, followed by flat, bean-like pods that rattle on the branches into winter. The genus name comes from the Greek kerkis, a weaver's shuttle, for the shape of those pods. Redbud is a legume without the nitrogen-fixing habit of many in the family, grown instead for beauty, for pollinators, and for the sheer welcome of the bloom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive Cercis canadensis full sun to part shade and any decent, well-drained soil, and site the tree where the spring show can be seen, at a woodland edge, along a drive, or against a darker evergreen backdrop that sets off the pink. Adaptable, quick to bloom while young, and beloved by early bees, redbud earns a place as a specimen, in a native or pollinator planting, or naturalized at the edge of the woods. This is one of the most cheerful of all the small native trees.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057830531187,"sku":"CERC-CANA-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1877.jpg?v=1720137133"},{"product_id":"cestrum-nocturnum","title":"Cestrum nocturnum","description":"\u003cp\u003eFew plants announce themselves the way \u003cem\u003eCestrum nocturnum\u003c\/em\u003e does, and never by daylight. Through the afternoon the shrub keeps to a quiet, almost ordinary green, the slender branches arching and half-climbing, the small tubular flowers furled and unremarkable. Then dusk arrives, the cream-green trumpets open, and the night-blooming jasmine releases a perfume so far-reaching that it carries across a whole garden on still, warm air.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA member of the nightshade family native to the tropical Americas, from Mexico and Central America through the Caribbean and into northern South America, this shrub has traveled with gardeners into every warm corner of the world, sometimes a little too successfully; in parts of the tropics the plant has naturalized and turned weedy. Fragrance accounts for the wandering. Across cultures the leaves have also found a place in folk practice: crushed for skin complaints in southern India, brewed against fevers in the Caribbean, the aromatic oil burned or rubbed to turn away mosquitoes in several African countries. The whole plant is toxic if eaten, the small white berries most of all.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, treat the night-blooming jasmine as a creature of the evening and plant accordingly. Site the shrub where people gather after dark, beside a patio, a doorway, or an open window, so the scent can do the work. In zone 8 the tops die to the ground; a Woodlanders trick is to mound about ten inches of coarse sand over the cut stubs after frost, then mulch with pine straw, lifting the covering as the weather warms so new shoots can rise. Given rich soil and steady water, the plant returns quickly and flowers through the heat of summer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057830793331,"sku":"CEST-NOCT-01G","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-877.jpg?v=1720137142"},{"product_id":"cistus-x-corbariensis-c-hybridus","title":"Cistus x corbariensis (C. hybridus)","description":"\u003cp\u003eCistus x corbariensis is a white rockrose, one of the toughest and most charming of the Mediterranean sun shrubs, covered through late spring and early summer in flowers like small single roses. Each bloom is pure white with a gold eye, the petals crinkled like tissue paper, opening from buds tinged red and lasting a single day before the next takes over. Despite the name, a rockrose is no relation to the true roses, belonging instead to the Cistaceae, the rockrose family of the dry Mediterranean hills.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis particular rockrose is a natural-looking hybrid of two Mediterranean species, Cistus populifolius and Cistus salviifolius, named for the Corbieres hills of southern France. The low, mounding shrub holds small, wavy-edged, gray-green evergreen leaves the year round, and the whole plant has the lean, sun-loving constitution of the Mediterranean, thriving on heat, drought, and poor, stony ground. Bees work the fleeting flowers through the long bloom.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRockrose asks for two things above all, full sun and sharp drainage, and repays them with months of bloom on almost no water. What the plant will not forgive is a wet winter or rich, heavy soil, so in the humid Southeast the rockrose does best on a raised bed, a slope, or gritty, fast-draining ground where the roots stay dry in the cold months. One of the hardiest of the rockroses, this hybrid holds through the low twenties, into the warmer parts of zone 7.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUse Cistus x corbariensis in a Mediterranean, gravel, or coastal garden, on a hot dry bank, or along a sunny, well-drained border where little else will bloom so freely on so little care. Drought tolerant, salt tolerant, and left alone by deer, the shrub earns a place wherever summer is hot and water is scarce. Trim lightly after flowering to keep the mound neat, but never cut back hard into old, bare wood.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eAdditional photos courtesy of Oregon State University\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057834987635,"sku":"CIST-CORB-C-HYBR-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/CistusxcorbariensisOSU.jpg?v=1784302900"},{"product_id":"cladrastis-kentukea","title":"Cladrastis kentukea","description":"\u003cp\u003eAmerican yellowwood is one of the loveliest and least common of our native trees, a broad, round-headed deciduous tree grown for three good seasons of interest. In late spring, usually May, long pendulous panicles of white, pea-like flowers hang from the branch tips, sweetly fragrant and wisteria-like, a spectacle in the years the tree chooses to flower heavily. Summer brings clean, bright-then-deep green compound foliage, and autumn a dependable, clear golden yellow that is among the best fall color of any hardwood. The smooth gray bark, beech-like, holds the winter garden.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe name comes from the wood: freshly cut, the heartwood is a clear yellow that once yielded a natural dye. \u003cem\u003eCladrastis kentukea\u003c\/em\u003e is native to scattered limestone woodlands of the southern and central United States, genuinely rare in the wild, yet long a favorite ornamental far to the north, hardy well into the cold. The tree takes many soils but is happiest on the rich, well-drained, higher-pH ground of the native haunts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, give yellowwood a sunny, open spot with room to spread the wide, low crown, a lawn specimen, a shade tree, or the centerpiece of a large border. Prune only in summer, since the tree bleeds sap heavily if cut in late winter, and train early for strong, wide-angled branches, as the wood can be brittle. A refined, four-season native worth the wait for the flowering years.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"1 Gallon","offer_id":42961910628467,"sku":"CLAD-KENT-01G","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"1 Quart","offer_id":42961910661235,"sku":"CLAD-KENT-01Q","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Cladrastis-kentukea-_o2eLMDPAOZUU.jpg?v=1743777042"},{"product_id":"clinopodium-coccineum","title":"Clinopodium coccineum","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eClinopodium coccineum\u003c\/em\u003e is a small, aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family, native to the deep, well-drained sands of the southeastern coastal plain from Mississippi and Georgia down into Florida. The loose, open frame and small, spicy-scented leaves would earn a quiet place on their own, but the flowers are the event: scarlet tubes an inch or two long, held out like little trumpets. Bloom comes heaviest in spring and again in fall, with scattered flowers through the summer between, and in the mildest gardens of zones 8 and 9 the plant will open something in almost any month the weather stays soft.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFew plants have been shuffled between genera as often as this one. Nuttall’s material was published as a \u003cem\u003eCunila\u003c\/em\u003e in 1825, and over the following century the species passed through \u003cem\u003eMelissa\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eGardoquia\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eCalamintha\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eSatureja\u003c\/em\u003e before Kuntze settled the present combination in 1891. The fault was never with the plant. The characters that were supposed to separate those genera, calyx shape and leaf form and geography, grade into one another, and molecular work has since confirmed that the old boundaries do not hold. \u003cem\u003eClinopodium\u003c\/em\u003e itself is a homely name, from the Greek for a bed and a little foot, a bedpost, for the shape of the flower clusters in the European type species. Woodlanders introduced the southern clinopodiums to gardeners in the 1980s and went on using that name straight through the decades when the authorities preferred \u003cem\u003eCalamintha\u003c\/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003eSatureja\u003c\/em\u003e. The authorities have since come round.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the wild scarlet calamint belongs to the longleaf pine sandhills and open flatwoods, with scrub and coastal dune populations at the edges, always in white sand and always in full sun. The long nectar tubes are built for hummingbirds, and both the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the Florida Wildflower Foundation name the plant a hummingbird draw; large butterflies work the flowers as well. The crushed foliage carries a clean, spicy scent that browsing deer usually pass over, though nobody should plant this or anything else on the assumption that deer read labels.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive scarlet calamint full sun and fast-draining sand, and site the shrub where the flowers and the hummingbird traffic can be watched up close: a hot bank, a gravel or xeric border, a rock garden, the front of a sunny native bed. Pair with salvias, little bluestem and other plants that ask for the same lean, dry ground, and run the planting along a path where brushing past releases the scent. One honest caution comes with the toughness. Scarlet calamint can be slow to settle and will not forgive wet feet while establishing, and then asks for very little for the rest of a long life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto credit to Jonas Meyer.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/news\/clinopodium-the-soft-power-of-the-mint-family\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eLearn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057845145715,"sku":"CLIN-COCC-01G","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/5C746564-9851-451B-A8A2-96F63DB56889.jpg?v=1782135232"},{"product_id":"clinopodium-satureja-calamintha-coccineum-ohoopee-yellow","title":"Clinopodium coccineum ‘Ohoopee Yellow’","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eClinopodium coccineum\u003c\/em\u003e ‘Ohoopee Yellow’ wears a contradictory name, since this is a clear, bright yellow-flowered form of a mint shrub that usually blooms in scarlet. Yellow forms turn up rarely in wild populations, and the floras note them in passing as a curiosity. This one was caught and kept.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe yellow form was originally shared with us by Ken Wurdak, who found the plant in Tattnall County, Georgia. We later lost our stock and got the clone back from Mike Creel, who had received starts from us years before. Such are plant sagas. Tattnall County sits in the Ohoopee dune country, a band of deep white sand blown up along the Ohoopee River that carries one of the strangest floras in Georgia, including the state-threatened Ohoopee wild basil, \u003cem\u003eClinopodium ashei\u003c\/em\u003e. Scarlet calamint grows on those same dunes, which is where the name comes from and why the plant is as drought-hardened as anything we sell.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA showy, long-flowering native for a sunny, sandy site, scarlet calamint grows wild across the deep sands of the southern coastal plain, flowering heaviest in spring and again in fall with scattered bloom between. Woodlanders introduced the southern clinopodiums to gardeners back in the 1980s and stubbornly went on calling them \u003cem\u003eClinopodium\u003c\/em\u003e while botanists spent a couple of decades insisting on \u003cem\u003eCalamintha\u003c\/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003eSatureja\u003c\/em\u003e. The authorities now agree that \u003cem\u003eClinopodium\u003c\/em\u003e is correct. Ah, vindication.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive ‘Ohoopee Yellow’ full sun and fast-draining, sandy soil, and site the subshrub where the clear yellow bloom and the hummingbird traffic can be enjoyed up close: a hot bank, a gravel or xeric border, a rock garden, the front of a sunny native bed. Deer usually pass the aromatic foliage over, and the plant asks almost nothing once settled, though the first season can be slow and wet ground will kill a young plant faster than drought ever will. Pair with salvias, grasses, and other sun-and-drought lovers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto courtesy of the \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/jcra.ncsu.edu\/resources\/photographs\/details.php?serial=418358\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eJC Raulston Arboretum\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/news\/clinopodium-the-soft-power-of-the-mint-family\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eLearn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057845440627,"sku":"CLIN-COCC-OHOO-YELL-01G","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Clinopodium_Satureja_Calamintha_coccineum_OhoopeeYellow.jpg?v=1722699561"},{"product_id":"cudrania-cochinchinensis","title":"Cudrania cochinchinensis","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis spiny, sprawling, half-vining shrub carries glossy evergreen leaves and a tangle of thorns. Sometimes classified as a \u003cem\u003eMaclura\u003c\/em\u003e and related to the native Osage orange, cockspur thorn ranges widely across eastern Asia and south to Australia, yet stays rare and little known in North America, familiar mostly to a few bonsai enthusiasts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWoodlanders first met this plant years ago at Pinewood Estate, a winter home built in the 1930s in the exclusive Mountain Lake development at Lake Wales, Florida. The original source is unknown, and we have not encountered the plant elsewhere. Propagated and planted in Aiken, South Carolina, cockspur thorn thrived for many years in a sunny, well-drained sandy spot until finally removed. We continue to make rare plants like this available.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe fruit is reportedly edible, though the species is dioecious and the sex of this clone is unknown, so a plant of the opposite sex nearby is needed for fruit to set. Give well-drained soil rich in organic matter; cockspur thorn takes sandy, loamy, or clay ground in stride so long as the drainage is good.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057854550131,"sku":"CUDR-COCH-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/IMG_9190.jpg?v=1722301537"},{"product_id":"danae-racemosa","title":"Danae racemosa","description":"\u003cp\u003eFew plants carry their history as plainly as \u003cem\u003eDanae racemosa\u003c\/em\u003e. The name reaches back to Greek myth, to Danae, daughter of the king of Argos, and the foliage carries a heavier classical freight than almost anything else you can grow in shade: Roman poet laureates are said to have worn the sprays as their wreath, and Alexander the Great may have taken his victory crowns from the same hills where he was fighting. Hence the two common names that have followed the plant for centuries, poet's laurel and Alexandrian laurel. Danae is, for the record, no true laurel at all.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat Danae is, botanically, is stranger and better. \u003cem\u003eDanae\u003c\/em\u003e is a monotypic genus, the only one of the kind, a monocot long filed among the lilies and now placed with the asparagus. The glossy, tapered leaves are not leaves but phylloclades, flattened stems doing a convincing impression of foliage. In spring the new growth comes up like asparagus or young bamboo, vertical canes rising from the crown that arch over as they lengthen into a soft, weeping fountain two to three feet tall and a little wider. The effect is fine-textured and deep green and holds every month of the year, which is rare enough in deep shade to feel like a small miracle.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe flowers are negligible by design, tiny and greenish, the kind you have to be told to look for. The fruit is the payoff: come autumn, the plants set bright red-orange berries that sit among the dark foliage and hold through winter, the whole reason florists have prized the cut stems for generations. Most of the commercial greenery, in fact, is grown in Italy and flown out weekly, which has saddled this Iranian native with the third name of Italian ruscus.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere is a reason you do not see them at every nursery. \u003cem\u003eDanae\u003c\/em\u003e grows slowly and resists propagation, taking five to seven years from seed to a plant worth selling, which is precisely how they became a treasured Southern pass-along, begged from a neighbor rather than bought. Give them shade, even deep shade, and ordinary well-drained soil; they ask for moisture to establish but shrug off drought once settled, and the deer leave them alone. Native to the woodlands of northern Iran and Asia Minor, hardy through roughly Zone 7, they bring a refinement to the dark corners of a garden that almost nothing else will, and a pedigree no other shade plant can touch.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057858416755,"sku":"DANA-RACE-01Q","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Danae_racemosa_JimRobbins.jpg?v=1763553410"},{"product_id":"dirca-palustris","title":"Dirca palustris","description":"\u003cp\u003eDirca palustris, the leatherwood, is a quiet native shrub with a hidden trick: branches so supple and tough they can be bent, twisted, even tied in a knot without snapping. That remarkable pliability, born of unusually soft, low-lignin wood, gave rise to the names leatherwood and ropebark, and made the bark a favorite of Native peoples for cordage. A slow, rounded, understory shrub of rich eastern woodlands, leatherwood is seldom offered and quietly prized by those who know it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn earliest spring, before the leaves and before almost anything else in the woods, small pale-yellow bells dangle from the bare, jointed twigs, an early gift of nectar to the first bees. Leatherwood belongs to the Daphne family, and shares the family's beauty and its bite, for every part is acrid and toxic, and the bark can irritate skin. The light green leaves follow, turning a clean, clear yellow in fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the wild this shrub grows in the shade of the eastern hardwood forests, in rich, moist, near-neutral soils, scattered from Canada to the Gulf but common nowhere. The flexible branches once served for rope, bowstrings, baskets, and fishing lines, the practical origin of every one of leatherwood's country names. That same strength and the early bloom make the plant as interesting to the curious gardener as it once was useful to the woodsman.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive Dirca palustris the conditions of a native woodland, part to full shade and rich, moist, well-drained soil, and shelter from hot afternoon sun that can scorch the leaves. A choice, uncommon shrub for a shade or woodland garden, leatherwood offers early flowers, clean yellow fall color, and a distinctive, jointed branch structure the year round. For the collector of native shrubs, this is a genuine and rarely seen prize.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057860776051,"sku":"DIRC-PALU-01G","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Dircapalustris.jpg?v=1784306936"},{"product_id":"dyschoriste-oblongifolia","title":"Dyschoriste oblongifolia","description":"\u003cp\u003eOblongleaf twinflower, \u003cem\u003eDyschoriste oblongifolia\u003c\/em\u003e, is a low, spreading wildflower of the American Southeast, a member of the acanthus family that carpets the dry pine flatwoods, sandhills, and open savannas of Florida and neighboring states. The common name comes from the habit of carrying the small, funnel-shaped flowers in pairs, twinned in the leaf axils along low stems, while the botanical epithet \u003cem\u003eoblongifolia\u003c\/em\u003e simply describes the neat, oblong leaves. An older regional name is snakeherb, a tag shared across the genus \u003cem\u003eDyschoriste\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom late spring into early winter the plant opens inch-wide blooms of soft blue to lavender-purple, each a five-lobed funnel veined in a deeper tone at the throat. Modest one at a time, they add up to a long, quiet season of color across the mat. For native-garden makers the real value runs deeper than looks: oblongleaf twinflower is a documented larval host for the common buckeye butterfly, and the flowers draw bees and a range of butterflies through the warm months, so a planting works as quietly for wildlife as for the eye.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStanding only six to eight inches tall and spreading slowly into a dense, low groundcover, the plant fills the ground layer where taller things would overwhelm. Set oblongleaf twinflower between stepping stones, along a path edge, at the front of a native bed, or as a tidy understory beneath pines and open-canopy shrubs. The slow, clumping spread stays where wanted rather than running, which makes the plant an easy neighbor in mixed native plantings and a natural fit for water-wise, low-input gardens.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrue to the dry, sunny flatwoods of the plant's origin, oblongleaf twinflower wants full sun to light shade and sharp, sandy drainage, and shrugs off heat and short droughts once the roots take hold. Hardy through roughly USDA zones 7 to 10 and semi-evergreen in the warmer end of that range, the plant returns dependably year after year. Woodlanders grew this stock from wild Florida material, so gardeners in the Southeast get a genuinely local native, at home in the very soils and seasons the species evolved to meet.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057863594099,"sku":"DYSC-OBLO-01Q","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-634.jpg?v=1720137962"},{"product_id":"enkianthus-campanulatus-rubrum","title":"Enkianthus campanulatus 'Rubrum' (Redvein Enkianthus)","description":"\u003cp\u003eRedvein enkianthus, \u003cem\u003eEnkianthus campanulatus\u003c\/em\u003e, is a refined deciduous shrub from the cool mountain woodlands of Japan, and the selection 'Rubrum' is the deepest-colored of the clan. In late spring the branches hang with dozens of small, waxy, bell-shaped flowers, but where the plain species opens in cream veined with pink, 'Rubrum' pours out flowers of rich, deep red, nodding in tidy clusters at the tips of each whorl of branches. Close up the bells look almost enameled; from a distance they veil the shrub in a soft red haze.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA member of the heath family and a cousin to azaleas, blueberries, and pieris, enkianthus shares their taste for cool, moist, acidic soil and their gift for autumn color. When the growing season ends, the neat, blue-green foliage turns through a long, smoky range of scarlet, orange, and wine-red, often holding for weeks and rivaling any burning bush. Few shrubs offer two such distinct seasons of interest, red in spring and red again in fall, on so tidy a frame.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe habit is as valuable as the color. Enkianthus grows slowly into an upright, tiered shrub with distinctly layered, almost horizontal branching, six to ten feet tall in time and narrower than wide, so the plant reads as elegant and architectural rather than bulky. Use 'Rubrum' as a specimen in a woodland or Japanese-style garden, in the light shade of high pines, or in a mixed acid-soil border with rhododendrons, Japanese maples, and ferns, where the fine branch structure shows to advantage even in winter bareness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive enkianthus the conditions that suit rhododendrons: moist but well-drained, humus-rich, acidic soil, a cool root run under mulch, and shelter from harsh, drying exposure. In the South the shrub is happiest in part shade, while cooler northern gardens can grow the plant in full sun with steady moisture. Hardy in USDA zones 5 through 8, slow, long-lived, and almost trouble-free, 'Rubrum' rewards patience with decades of quiet, two-season beauty.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057865134195,"sku":"ENKI-CAMP-RUBR-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/FullSizeRender_65525725-edd8-4efe-939b-4a7c7855691d.jpg?v=1772022633"},{"product_id":"ficus-vaccinoides","title":"Ficus vaccinioides","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe Latin gives away the joke before you have even seen the plant. \u003cem\u003eFicus vaccinioides\u003c\/em\u003e, the Formosan creeping fig, is a fig that has decided to impersonate a blueberry: \u003cem\u003evaccinioides\u003c\/em\u003e means resembling \u003cem\u003eVaccinium\u003c\/em\u003e, and the small, glossy, obovate leaves running close along reddish stems really could pass for an evergreen huckleberry. They are no relation at all. They are a true fig, latex and all, just one that has shrunk to a few inches tall and given up any ambition of climbing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat last part is what sets them apart from the creeping fig everyone knows. \u003cem\u003eFicus pumila\u003c\/em\u003e will swallow a wall; this one stays low and well-mannered, mounding and trailing into a dense, fine-textured evergreen carpet, rooting as it goes but never scaling anything it should not. The effect is quiet and faintly luxurious, the kind of restrained sheen that reads as intentional in a way few groundcovers manage. They are equally at home spilling from a container, softening the edge of a shaded bed, or threading over the face of a low wall.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey come from the littoral thickets of southern Taiwan, and they are tougher than the delicate look suggests: notably more cold-hardy than most figs, holding evergreen through mild winters and proven at the JC Raulston Arboretum up in Zone 7, where in a sheltered spot they take hard cold by dropping their leaves and returning from the root. That toughness is, in fact, how they reached us. This is a plant that traveled, carried along by collectors who recognized something worth keeping: out of Yucca Do Nursery in Texas, on to Riverbanks Botanical Garden in Columbia, into the collections at the JC Raulston Arboretum at NC State, and at last to Aiken. The finest plants often arrive by exactly this kind of roundabout, hand-to-hand route, which is usually a sign they were worth the trip.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA choice, collectable little thing, sterile and undemanding, asking only for part shade to sun and a soil that drains. \u003cem\u003eFicus vaccinioides\u003c\/em\u003e will not shout for attention. They will simply make everything around them look considered.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto courtesy of the JC Raulston Arboretum\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057869852787,"sku":"FICU-VACC-01G","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/FicusvaccinoidesJCRA_eb886c17-0f0e-438b-99e8-1486c0026aca.jpg?v=1762295259"},{"product_id":"hyalis-argentea-var-argentea","title":"Hyalis argentea var. argentea","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHyalis argentea\u003c\/em\u003e var. \u003cem\u003eargentea\u003c\/em\u003e is a plant that spends most of a growing season being mistaken for something else. The leaves are narrow, silver, and whorled along willowy upright stems, so the whole clump reads as an ornamental grass from any distance at all, and the effect is entirely convincing until the flowers open. Then the family shows: this is an aster relative, in the Asteraceae, and the flowers on the taller stems carry only a few ray florets each but are attractive in a spare, high-desert way that suits the foliage exactly. A sub-shrub or perennial to about three feet, clump-forming and modestly stoloniferous.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis plant is a Woodlanders introduction from Mendoza Province, Argentina, and has been hardy and evergreen here in Aiken, South Carolina. That combination is the whole reason the plant is worth your attention. Mendoza sits in the rain shadow of the Andes, high, bright, and dry, and the silver of the foliage is the plant's answer to that light. What was not obvious in advance is that the same construction would carry a South Carolina winter without losing the leaves, which is a genuinely useful trait in a silver plant; most of the silver perennials Southern gardeners try either rot in humidity or go bare and ugly in January.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe names describe what you see. \u003cem\u003eHyalis\u003c\/em\u003e comes from the Greek for glassy or transparent, apparently for the papery, translucent quality of the flower bracts, and \u003cem\u003eargentea\u003c\/em\u003e is simply silvery. The genus is small and South American, and this is very nearly the only member anyone in North American horticulture has grown. Older references file the family as Compositae; Asteraceae is the current name for the same group, and both turn up on labels.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUse the plant as a silver accent in a sunny, sharply drained site, and place with the same logic you would use for a small grass: in a drift, at the front of a border, along a gravel path, or spilling toward a walk where the low winter light can catch the foliage. Pair with agaves, \u003cem\u003eDasylirion\u003c\/em\u003e, rosemary, muhly grass, and the drier salvias. Water through establishment and then very little; the enemy is wet feet rather than cold. Divide or transplant in early spring if the clump spreads further than wanted. Very few American nurseries carry this plant, and the ones that do got the plant from here.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057885352051,"sku":"HYAL-ARGE-ARGE-01G","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/42EA0A98-4560-490B-84A5-872634B9664F.jpg?v=1787793894"},{"product_id":"ilex-cassine-female","title":"Ilex cassine (female)","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eIlex cassine\u003c\/em\u003e, the dahoon holly, is an elegant evergreen native of the southern wetlands, and this is a fruiting female, the sex that carries the crop of small, glossy red berries. Unlike the fiercely spined American holly, dahoon holds narrow, smooth-edged, bright green leaves that are a pleasure to plant near a path, and in fall and winter the branches string themselves with scarlet fruit against that clean green. Grown as a large shrub or a small tree, dahoon is one of the most useful evergreen hollies for the South.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA word every holly buyer should hear: this is a dioecious plant, with male and female flowers on separate plants, so a female like this one will only set berries when a male dahoon, or another compatible holly blooming at the same time, grows within reach of the bees. Plant a male somewhere nearby and the reward is heavy, reliable fruit; plant a female alone and the berries will not come. The small greenish-white spring flowers feed bees, and the winter berries feed the birds.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe name is a two-hundred-year-old mistake nobody has managed to undo. Spanish colonists in sixteenth-century Florida heard the Timucua word for the celebrated black drink, wrote it down as cacina, and Linnaeus attached that beverage-word to this holly in 1753. The plant actually brewed for the black drink was yaupon, \u003cem\u003eIlex vomitoria\u003c\/em\u003e, which Aiton named properly in 1789. So dahoon carries the name of the drink without the chemistry to match: a 2019 survey of the genus found the stimulant alkaloids in yaupon, yerba mate and guayusa, and specifically failed to corroborate older reports of caffeine in \u003cem\u003eIlex cassine\u003c\/em\u003e. The common name is no clearer. Thomas Walter published \u003cem\u003eIlex dahoon\u003c\/em\u003e in 1788 and the origin of the word has never been established.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDahoon is a plant of swamps, pond edges, and wet flatwoods along the coastal plain from the Carolinas to Texas, and takes happily to wet ground, standing water, and heavy rain where many evergreens sulk. In the garden the plant is more forgiving still, thriving on ordinary moist, acid soil in full sun or part shade, asking mainly that the roots not bake dry. Growth is steady rather than fast, building over the years into a dense, glossy screen. Where dahoon and American holly meet in the wild they cross, and a hybrid found in Florida in 1924 became \u003cem\u003eIlex\u003c\/em\u003e × \u003cem\u003eattenuata\u003c\/em\u003e, the parent of ‘East Palatka’ and of the Foster hollies, which is a larger contribution to American gardens than the species is usually given credit for.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUse \u003cem\u003eIlex cassine\u003c\/em\u003e as an evergreen screen or hedge, a berrying specimen, or a small tree for a rain garden, a pond margin, or any low, wet spot that needs a handsome, non-prickly evergreen. The persistent red fruit brings birds through the winter, and the smooth foliage makes the plant safe and pleasant beside walks and seating. One honest caution comes with the crop: hollies are mildly toxic to people and to dogs and cats, so the fruit is for admiring and for the waxwings, not for eating.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057894953075,"sku":"ILE-CASS-FEMA-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Ilexcassine_female.jpg?v=1784325148"},{"product_id":"juniperus-communis-var-depressa","title":"Juniperus communis var. depressa ‘Hitchcock’","description":"\u003cp\u003eJuniperus communis, the common juniper, is the most widespread conifer in the world, a circumboreal shrub of northern latitudes and high elevations, and the source of the aromatic berries that flavor gin. The variety depressa is the low, ground-hugging North American form, a prostrate mat of prickly, blue-green needles. 'Hitchcock' is a Woodlanders selection of that low form, and hangs on one of the more remarkable botanical stories in the Southeast.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe clone traces to a disjunct, apparently single-clone population discovered near Aiken, South Carolina, by the botanist Henry Ravenel in the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of miles south of the species' usual range. Woodlanders rediscovered Ravenel's historic site years ago in Aiken's Hitchcock Woods preserve, the southernmost known station for common juniper anywhere, where the plant grows in deep, sandy, acid soil under the light shade of scattered pines, sparkleberry, and mountain laurel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCommon juniper is more than a curiosity. The ripe blue berry-cones, technically fleshy cones rather than true fruit, have flavored gin since the seventeenth century, when the spirit was first made as a medicinal tonic for the berries' diuretic action, and juniper has a long history in European and Native American medicine for urinary and digestive complaints. This is traditional-use information, shared for interest only, and not medical advice.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs a garden plant 'Hitchcock' is a tough, fine-textured evergreen groundcover for a sunny to lightly shaded, well-drained, sandy or gritty site, a rock garden, a slope, or the front of a dry border. The prostrate mat knits along the ground, needs no shearing, and shrugs off heat, drought, and poor soil. Grow this clone as much for its story as its texture, a living piece of Southern botanical history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057903472755,"sku":"JUNI-COMM-VAR-DEPR-01G","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/E163E486-1C3C-44F1-B7F1-C96C6D78C5E8.jpg?v=1727799148"},{"product_id":"kalmia-angustifolia-var-caroliniana","title":"Kalmia angustifolia var. caroliniana","description":"\u003cp\u003eSheep laurel belongs to the heath family (Ericaceae), kin to the rhododendrons, blueberries, and pieris, and shares that family's love of cool, sour, peaty ground. The genus name honors Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist and student of Linnaeus who traveled the eastern colonies in the 1740s and sent plants and seed back to Uppsala; Linnaeus returned the compliment by fixing his pupil's name to this handsome American genus. The species epithet angustifolia simply means narrow-leaved, while caroliniana marks the southern form described from the Carolinas, distinguished by leaves softly gray-felted on their undersides.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarolina sheep laurel is a low, somewhat rhizomatous evergreen shrub, usually two to three feet high, spreading gently into loose colonies. The narrow, leathery leaves are held in whorls of three, and in early summer the stems carry tight clusters of deep pink, saucer-shaped flowers. Each bloom performs one of the loveliest tricks in the American flora: the ten anthers are bent back and tucked into small pockets in the corolla, held under tension until a visiting bee trips them, whereupon they snap forward and shower the insect with pollen. The effect, repeated across a whole colony in bloom, is quietly mechanical and endlessly watchable.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe plant's darker common names, lambkill, sheep-poison, and calf-kill, tell the other half of the story. All parts of sheep laurel contain grayanotoxins, and grazing animals that eat the foliage, most dangerously sheep and young cattle, can be seriously poisoned. Indigenous peoples of the East knew the plant's power well and handled the shrub with care, recording only cautious, limited uses such as powdered leaves taken as snuff for a head cold. Given that toxicity, sheep laurel is grown as an ornamental and a wildlife plant, not a medicinal or edible one, and the foliage should be kept away from livestock and curious mouths.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, sheep laurel is a specialist worth courting for damp, acidic sites where more conventional shrubs fail. Native from southeastern Virginia through Georgia in moist pinelands, pocosin edges, and mountain bogs, the shrub belongs in the bog garden, the pond margin, or the low acidic border, ideally in bold drifts among blueberry, inkberry, sweet pepperbush, and pitcher plants. Give the roots steady moisture, strongly acid soil, and a mulch of pine straw, set the colony in sun for the fullest bloom, and let the toxic foliage do quiet double duty as a deer-resistant groundcover shrub.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057905733747,"sku":"KALM-ANGU-CARO-01G","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Kalmiaangustifoliavar.caroliniana.jpg?v=1784576694"},{"product_id":"lindera-benzoin","title":"Lindera benzoin","description":"\u003cp\u003eSpicebush is the shrub that tells you the ground is good. Early land surveyors in the eastern states used \u003cem\u003eLindera benzoin\u003c\/em\u003e as an indicator of rich agricultural soil, and the rule holds in the garden: where spicebush thrives, most things will. The plant is a common understory shrub of moist, rich woods from Ontario to Florida and west to Texas, growing six to twelve feet in a loose rounded mass, often colonial from root sprouts, and every part smells of citrus and pepper when bruised.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe flowers come first, in March or early April, small greenish-yellow clusters held tight against bare gray stems, a haze of color across the woods before anything leafs out. Spicebush is dioecious, so male and female flowers occur on separate plants, and only females carry the scarlet drupes that follow in late summer. Our plants are seedlings of undetermined sex, so a group planting is the surest route to fruit. Wood thrushes, veeries, and better than twenty other bird species strip the berries, which are unusually rich in lipids and time their ripening to fall migration.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe name carries two histories. Carl Peter Thunberg established the genus in 1783 for Johann Linder, a Swedish botanist and physician; the epithet \u003cem\u003ebenzoin\u003c\/em\u003e comes through Middle French from the Arabic luban jawi, \"frankincense of Java,\" borrowed for the balsamic scent of the leaves and twigs. Colonists knew the shrub as fever bush and wild allspice, drying the ripe drupes as an allspice substitute and steeping the twigs into tea. Creek, Cherokee, Rappahannock, Mohegan, Iroquois, and Chippewa people used bark, twigs, and fruit across more than thirty recorded medicinal preparations, and also to flavor game.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor the gardener, spicebush is a three-season native with an outsized ecological return. The shrub is the primary host of the spicebush swallowtail, whose caterpillars fold themselves into leaf tents and wear a pair of false eyespots convincing enough to read as a small snake, and the promethea silkmoth spins cocoons among the twigs that hang on all winter looking like dead leaves. Fall color is a clean unmixed yellow, luminous in shade. Plant spicebush at a woodland edge, along a stream, or in any semi-shaded place with steady moisture, in groups rather than as a lone specimen, and allow room to sucker gently outward.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePhotos courtesy of William Friedman and John Anderson.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057911959667,"sku":"LIND-BENZ-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/LinderabenzoinArnoldArboretum.jpg?v=1725388738"},{"product_id":"morus-rubra","title":"Morus rubra","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe red mulberry, \u003cem\u003eMorus rubra\u003c\/em\u003e, is the eastern woodlands' own mulberry, a medium to large deciduous tree native across the eastern United States from New England to Texas. The genus name \u003cem\u003eMorus\u003c\/em\u003e is simply the old Latin word for mulberry, and \u003cem\u003erubra\u003c\/em\u003e, red, points less to the ripe fruit, which darkens to near black, than to the reddish cast of the young growth. Broad, heart-shaped, sandpaper-rough leaves clothe a wide, rounded crown, and where a female tree grows the summer branches hang heavy with blackberry-like fruit.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMulberries carry a curious chapter of American history. When the early colonists dreamed of a homegrown silk industry, mulberry trees were the linchpin, since silkworms feed on mulberry leaves, and the native red mulberry was pressed into service before the Asian white mulberry (\u003cem\u003eMorus alba\u003c\/em\u003e) largely took over the role. The silk venture never flourished in the way its backers hoped, but the trees remained, and the red mulberry has stayed a fixture of southern dooryards and fencerows, valued less for silk than for the fruit that children have always gathered straight from the branch.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe fruit has fed people for a very long time. The De Soto expedition recorded Muskogee people drying mulberries as early as the 1500s, and the tree held a place in Native medicine as well: the Cherokee steeped the bark into an infusion taken as a laxative and to clear intestinal worms, and dabbed the milky sap on the skin to treat ringworm, while other nations turned the root to weakness and urinary complaints. The ripe berries, sweet and juicy, still make fine jams, jellies, pies, and fresh eating, and what the household does not gather feeds an astonishing traffic of birds, squirrels, and other wildlife.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the garden the red mulberry makes a fast, generous shade tree for a large lawn, a woodland edge, or an edible and wildlife planting, in full sun to part shade and moist, well-drained soil. Site the tree with a little forethought, since the ripe fruit drops freely and stains what lies beneath, so a spot away from patios, walks, and parked cars is kindest. Plant where the summer harvest can be reached and the birds watched, give room for the broad crown, and the tree repays with shade, fruit, and decades of easy company. These are seed-grown trees, so no two are quite alike, and a given plant may prove male or female.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057925394547,"sku":"MORU-RUBR-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/morus-rubra-WhatsAllThisThen-ccbyncnd20.jpg?v=1731591993"},{"product_id":"osteomeles-schweriniae","title":"Osteomeles schweriniae","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOsteomeles schweriniae\u003c\/em\u003e, the bone apple, is a refined evergreen shrub in the rose family, close kin to hawthorn, cotoneaster, and photinia, and a botanical rarity seldom seen in American gardens. The genus name joins the Greek \u003cem\u003eosteon\u003c\/em\u003e, bone, and \u003cem\u003emelon\u003c\/em\u003e, apple, a nod to the stony hardness of the little fruits, while the species epithet honors the German dendrologist Count Fritz von Schwerin. Native to the dry valleys and open slopes of Yunnan and western Sichuan in southwestern China, the shrub carries very small, ferny, pinnate leaves along dense, wiry, arching stems, giving a fine texture unusual among broadleaf evergreens.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn late spring and summer the branches carry loose clusters of small white flowers, five-petaled and hawthorn-like, that draw bees and other pollinators. These give way to small, round pomes, technically miniature apples, that ripen from white through blue-black. The fruits are sweet and edible, eaten raw off the branch or cooked down into jellies and jams, and the same hard little pomes that inspired the name bone apple hold on the plant well into the cooler months.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe fine foliage, dense twiggy frame, and tiny evergreen leaves make the bone apple a natural for close-range display. Grow the shrub as a low informal hedge, a specimen in a gravel or dry garden, or the front of a sunny border, and site where the ferny texture and pale flowers can be read up close, near a path, a patio, or a low wall. The species is also a long-favored subject for bonsai, since the miniature leaves and gnarled, arching stems reduce beautifully under training.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDrought tolerant once established and content on lean, sharply drained ground, the bone apple asks for full sun to part shade and little else. Pair the shrub with rosemary, lavender, small ornamental grasses, and other sun-and-drought lovers, and keep richer, wetter soil well away. At the cold edge of the range a large container makes the plant easy to shelter through hard freezes. A collector's shrub that earns a place for texture, fruit, and the quiet pleasure of growing something few gardeners know.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057933717619,"sku":"OSTE-SCHW-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/840EBE13-B527-4135-9157-EA0D074C3489.jpg?v=1771964563"},{"product_id":"quercus-muehlenbergii","title":"Quercus muehlenbergii","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis oak carries the name of a Pennsylvania parson. Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg was a Lutheran minister who botanized on the side, thoroughly enough that the German-American botanist George Engelmann named the species for him, and then misspelled it: Engelmann set an umlaut over the u that Muhlenberg never used, and the rules of botanical naming have fossilized the slip ever since, transliterating it into the tongue-twisting \u003cem\u003emuehlenbergii\u003c\/em\u003e we are stuck with.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe common name is older and kinder. Chinquapin is the chestnut family's word for a small sweet nut, and this oak wears chestnut-shaped leaves, glossy and coarsely toothed and pale beneath, to go with acorns that are themselves among the sweetest in the genus, edible nearly off the tree where most oaks need leaching to be borne.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat sets chinquapin oak apart from almost every other oak is a taste in ground. This is a limestone tree, happiest on sweet, alkaline, rocky soil where the acid-loving oaks turn sickly and yellow, which makes the species the answer to a question most growers cannot otherwise solve. The tree builds slowly into a medium oak with an open, rounded crown and ashy, flaky, white-oak bark good to look at all winter.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGive chinquapin oak sun and a soil that leans alkaline, and the tree will quietly thrive where the others cannot: a specimen or shade tree for a limestone or high-pH lawn, a park, a street, or a naturalistic native planting on sweet, rocky ground. Full sun brings the best form; pair with other lime-tolerant natives, allow room for a broad, rounded, forty- to sixty-foot crown, and let the sweet acorns feed the deer, turkey, and squirrels that seek them out.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057951543411,"sku":"QUER-MUEH-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-216.jpg?v=1720140420"},{"product_id":"quercus-laevis","title":"Quercus laevis","description":"\u003cp\u003eTurkey oak earns the name from the leaf, three-lobed and clawed and splayed exactly like the track a wild turkey leaves in sand, which is fitting, because sand is where these trees live. \u003cem\u003eQuercus laevis\u003c\/em\u003e is the signature oak of the deep sandhills, the droughty white-sand ridges of the longleaf country from the Carolinas to the Gulf, ground so poor and so hot that most trees simply decline the invitation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThey answer the heat with a trick worth knowing: the leaves hang vertically, turned edge-on to the midday sun, so the blade sheds the worst of the light instead of catching it, and the tree stays cool in a place that bakes. The species name \u003cem\u003elaevis\u003c\/em\u003e means smooth, for the glossy, hairless leaves, which turn a hard orange-red in November and hang on into the cold.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTurkey oaks make a small, often crooked, characterful tree rather than a shade giant, and they belong with the company they evolved beside; our journal has \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/longleaf-pine-restoration-and-the-art-of-restraint-in-modern-landscape-design\"\u003ea piece on the longleaf sandhills\u003c\/a\u003e and the art of planting with their restraint. In that fire-run country the acorns feed deer, turkey, and jays on ground that offers little else.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGive turkey oak deep sand, full sun, and no irrigation to speak of, and the tree will thrive precisely where you had given up on growing an oak at all. Use the tree as a small, sculptural specimen in a dry native or xeric garden, a sandhill restoration, or a hot bank, and pair with longleaf pine, wiregrass, and other sandhill natives. Sharp drainage is everything; the one thing turkey oak will not forgive is wet, heavy ground.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057952034931,"sku":"QUER-LAEV-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-212.jpg?v=1720140427"},{"product_id":"quercus-prinoides","title":"Quercus prinoides","description":"\u003cp\u003eDwarf chinquapin oak is the oak for gardeners in a hurry, a small, shrubby white oak that starts bearing sweet acorns while still only a few feet tall. Where most oaks make you wait a generation, this one fruits at three to five years old and crops nearly every year after, a rare and useful trick. The plant grows as a rhizomatous, colony-forming shrub or small tree of ten to twenty feet, clothed in glossy, chestnut-like leaves with wavy, blunt teeth.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe acorns are the point, and they are the good kind. As a member of the white oak group, dwarf chinquapin oak bears sweet, low-tannin acorns that ripen in a single season, palatable to people with little or no leaching and relished by nearly everything with fur or feathers: deer, turkey, quail, grouse, squirrels, and jays. The epithet prinoides means resembling Prinus, the old name for the chestnut oak, for the chestnut-like toothing of the leaves. Few native plants pack so much wildlife value into so small a package.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is a tough, undemanding native of dry, sterile, sunny ground, glades and barrens and rocky slopes from the Midwest to the eastern Piedmont, asking for the same in the garden: full sun and lean, well-drained, even rocky or slightly limy soil. Drought and heat are no trouble, and the rhizomatous habit slowly builds a low thicket that can be left to spread or kept in bounds. Hardy through USDA zones 5 to 8, the leaves color bronze, gold, and copper-red in fall.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor a smaller property, an edible landscape, or a wildlife planting, dwarf chinquapin oak is one of the most rewarding oaks going, offering an oak's ecology and a sweet, early acorn crop at shrub scale. Naturalize the plant on a dry sunny bank, plant a small grove for the wildlife, or grow one as a low specimen, and enjoy an oak that gives back within a few short years rather than a few long decades.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057958457459,"sku":"QUER-PRIN-01G","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/QuercusprinoidesArnoldArboretum.jpg?v=1784337875"},{"product_id":"rhododendron-atlanticum-x-austrinum-pale-yellow","title":"Rhododendron atlanticum x austrinum (Pale Yellow)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis fragrant deciduous azalea is a garden cross between two native species, the low, glaucous-leaved coast azalea, \u003cem\u003eRhododendron atlanticum\u003c\/em\u003e, and the golden Florida azalea, \u003cem\u003eRhododendron austrinum\u003c\/em\u003e. From the first parent the hybrid inherits sweet fragrance and cool foliage; from the second, warmth of color and vigor. The result, selected here for pale, clear yellow flowers, blends the best of both, and where the ranges of the two species meet along the Southern coastal plain, such crosses occasionally arise in the wild as well.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn April, early in the native-azalea season, the shrub opens fragrant clusters of soft, clear yellow flowers, tubular and long-stamened in the honeysuckle manner of the wild azaleas. The color is gentler than the fiery orange-golds of many austrinum selections, a pale, buttery yellow that reads softly in dappled light and carries a sweet perfume through the spring garden. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek, while azalea derives from azaleos, meaning dry, an old reference to the well-drained woodland these shrubs prefer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike both parents, the hybrid belongs to the group of Southern native azaleas long grown as bush honeysuckles for scent and spring color. And like all of them, the shrub is for the eye and the nose rather than the table: every Rhododendron carries grayanotoxins in leaf and nectar, and none should be eaten. The flowers instead feed the early pollinators, drawing butterflies, native bees, and returning hummingbirds to the season's first nectar.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMore compact than a full-sized austrinum, reaching perhaps six to seven feet with a balanced, informal frame, this pale yellow azalea suits a woodland border, a lightly shaded bed, or a naturalistic planting where soft color and fragrance matter more than bold contrast. Give filtered sun or morning light with afternoon shade, and a moist, acidic, well-drained soil enriched with pine bark or leaf mold. Mulch the shallow roots, and combine the shrub with ferns, native phlox, and other native azaleas timed to open in sequence, so the soft yellow of April gives way to the whites and oranges that follow.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057970450547,"sku":"RHOD-ATLA-X-AUST-01G","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/IMG_4372.jpg?v=1787256678"},{"product_id":"rhododendron-austrinum-harrisons-red","title":"Rhododendron austrinum 'Harrison's Red'","description":"The Florida Azalea is a large growing deciduous azalea. The fragrant flowers very early and typically yellow. The flowers of this clone are a \u003cstrong\u003eunique coral color\u003c\/strong\u003e. This selection was found some years ago and introduced by Falling Waters Nursery in Chipley, Florida. Florida Azalea blooms here in South Carolina in late March-early April and is one of the best native azaleas for the Deep South. It grows well with irrigation under tall pines where soil is sandy, acidic, and well-drained. It is native to Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama.","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057972777075,"sku":"RHOD-AUST-HARR-RED-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-495.jpg?v=1720140772"},{"product_id":"rhododendron-x-kosterana-x-prinophyllum","title":"Rhododendron x kosterana x prinophyllum","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis hardy hybrid azalea is a piece of Woodlanders history, a deliberate cross made by the nursery's late founder, Robert Mackintosh. Mackintosh crossed the native roseshell azalea, Rhododendron prinophyllum, with the old hybrid group known as R. x kosterana, or mollis azalea, and the result is an upright, large-flowered deciduous shrub carrying bold orange trusses each marked with a splash of yellow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe parentage is worth telling in full, because the lineage spans three continents. The roseshell azalea is one of the most northerly and most fragrant of the American natives, a rosy-pink shrub of New England and the higher Appalachians famous for a strong cinnamon-and-clove scent. The mollis side reaches farther afield: R. x kosterana is itself a cross of the Japanese azalea, Rhododendron japonicum, with the Chinese Rhododendron molle, a parentage that lends the hot orange and yellow coloring and the large flower size. Blending a hardy, fragrant American parent with the vivid color of the Asian mollis azaleas is exactly the kind of cross a plantsman makes to get the best of both.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe flowers open in spring on an upright frame of four to eight feet, large and showy, glowing orange with a gold flare at the throat, and set off against fresh green deciduous leaves. Early bees and butterflies work the trusses. As with every azalea, the whole plant carries grayanotoxins and is poisonous if eaten, so the shrub is one to grow for the spring show and keep clear of children and livestock.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGrow the hybrid as other native and deciduous azaleas are grown: in the high, filtered shade of tall pines, at a woodland edge, or in a mixed border, where the vivid spring color can carry across the garden. Give cool, moist, acidic, well-drained soil, mulch the shallow roots with pine straw, and pair with fragrant pink and white native azaleas so the hot orange has something cool to play against. A hardy, characterful cross with a genuine Woodlanders story behind the plant.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057974579315,"sku":"RHOD-KOST-PRIN-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-1329.jpg?v=1720140814"},{"product_id":"rhododendron-alabamense-frosty","title":"Rhododendron alabamense 'Frosty'","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRhododendron alabamense\u003c\/em\u003e, the Alabama azalea, is one of the loveliest and, by wide agreement, one of the most powerfully fragrant of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Southeast. The species grows in hardwood forests and along dry slopes and ridges from north-central Alabama east through western Georgia and into South Carolina, where in mid spring the woods fill with the scent of lemon. Clusters of six to ten white, funnel-shaped flowers, each marked with a clear yellow blotch and finished with long, arching stamens, open just before or alongside the emerging leaves. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek, while azalea derives from azaleos, meaning dry, a nod to the well-drained upland ground these shrubs favor.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Frosty' is a named form selected years ago in southwest Georgia by Terry Greer, whose own name is sometimes attached to the plant. Cuttings came to us from our friend and fellow plant nut Dean Jolly. The selection carries the typical white, yellow-blotched, lemon-scented flowers of the species, but earns the name 'Frosty' for handsome, somewhat glaucous foliage, that cool blue-gray cast frosted over the summer leaves. Low and rounded, usually under six feet and inclined to sucker gently into a colony, the shrub keeps a tidy presence long after the flowers have passed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe wild azaleas of the Southern woods have been admired for generations as bush honeysuckles, prized for perfume and spring color rather than for any use in the kitchen or the still-room. That distinction is worth remembering: like all Rhododendron, the leaves and nectar of 'Frosty' hold grayanotoxins and are not to be eaten by people or animals. The flowers, however, are a banquet for others, drawing in early butterflies, native bees, and the season's first hummingbirds to the sweetly scented trusses.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the garden 'Frosty' asks for the conditions of a Southern woodland edge: dappled light or morning sun with afternoon shade, and a moist but sharply drained, acidic soil laced with pine bark or leaf mold. Set the shrub where the lemon fragrance can be caught on a spring evening, near a path, a porch, or a garden bench, and let the glaucous foliage cool the greens around it through summer. The suckering habit suits a naturalistic planting among ferns, foamflower, and native phlox, or a loose drift of mixed native azaleas that stretch the bloom season from first warmth into early summer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057974743155,"sku":"RHOD-ALAB-FROS-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-2071.jpg?v=1720140819"},{"product_id":"rhododendron-colemanii","title":"Rhododendron colemanii","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eRhododendron colemanii\u003c\/em\u003e, 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, \u003cem\u003eRhododendron alabamense\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBlooming in mid to late May, well after most native azaleas have finished, the Red Hills azalea opens fragrant, tubular flowers that may echo the white-and-yellow of the Alabama azalea or run to white, pink, or soft yellow, with or without a blotch, so that no two plants are quite alike. The long-stamened blooms carry the sweet honeysuckle scent for which the wild azaleas are loved, and the late timing extends the native-azalea season into early summer. Green summer leaves close the year in yellow and bronze.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRestricted in the wild and still little known in cultivation, the Red Hills azalea is a genuine rarity, a plant that only recently stepped out of the shadow of a better-known cousin. Like all the Southern wild azaleas, the shrub is grown for fragrance and flower rather than the table: every Rhododendron carries grayanotoxins in leaf and nectar and should not be eaten by people or pets. The late, nectar-rich flowers feed bees and butterflies at a season when little else in the shade garden is in bloom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA tall, multi-stemmed shrub reaching ten to twelve feet in time, the Red Hills azalea belongs at the woodland edge, along a shaded creek, or in a naturalistic native planting that mirrors the wild home on slopes and stream banks. Give sandy, acidic, well-drained soil, filtered light or morning sun with afternoon shade, and steady moisture without soggy ground. Set the shrub where the late fragrance can be caught, and pair with ferns, native phlox, and earlier-blooming azaleas so the season runs from first warmth into summer. Additional photos courtesy of Ron Miller.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057975693427,"sku":"RHOD-COLE-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-2138.jpg?v=1720140844"},{"product_id":"tagetes-lucida","title":"Tagetes lucida","description":"\u003cp\u003eTagetes lucida is the herb that does it all. Known as Mexican tarragon, Mexican mint marigold, pericón, and, in the old Aztec tongue, yauhtli, this fragrant perennial from Mexico and Central America earns every name. The narrow, glossy, deep-green leaves carry a warm anise-tarragon scent and flavor, and in late summer and fall the plant scatters small, single, golden-yellow marigold flowers across a tidy foot-and-a-half mound.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the kitchen, Mexican tarragon is the Southern gardener's answer to French tarragon, which sulks in heat and humidity. The chopped leaves bring the same sweet, anise-tinged note to corn on the cob, chayote, green beans, squash, vinegars, and teas, and thrive through the very summers that defeat true tarragon. Native to Mexico and Central America, this is a warm-climate herb that flourishes where French tarragon fails.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe plant carries a deep cultural history. The Aztecs burned Tagetes lucida as the sacred incense yauhtli, dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc, folded the leaves into the ceremonial drink chocolatl, and turned to the herb in folk medicine, a tradition alive across Mexico today. Pericón has long been taken as a gentle calmative and mild sedative, and brewed as a tea for stomach aches, colic, nausea, hiccups, diarrhea, colds, and coughs. The flowers still appear in Day of the Dead observances across the region.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the garden, give Mexican tarragon full sun and well-drained soil, and the plant thrives on heat and modest water. Use the herb in a kitchen or pollinator bed, an ornamental-edible border, or a container, where the golden fall flowers feed bees and butterflies and the aromatic foliage turns deer aside. Perennial in the Deep South and warm zones, and easily grown as a summer annual or overwintered indoors farther north.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058000826483,"sku":"TAGE-LUCI-01G","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/TageteslucidaWoodlanders2.jpg?v=1730254567"},{"product_id":"thujopsis-dolobrata-nana","title":"Thujopsis dolabrata 'Nana'","description":"\u003cp\u003eA 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'Nana' is the dwarf form, a Japanese garden selection old enough that no one is sure exactly when it arose, though Veitch and Sons Nursery in England introduced the plant to the Western trade in the early 1860s, placing it in the same wave of Japanese garden cultivars that arrived as Meiji-era Japan opened to the West. The plant grows as a flat-topped, bun-shaped mound, and slowly: real growth measures in inches a year, not feet, a foot tall and three feet wide after a decade being typical, and four to six feet across after twenty years and more the upper end.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe visual signature is the foliage. Each leaf is a thick, hatchet-shaped scale, the epithet dolabrata coming from the Latin dolabra, a hatchet, arranged in flat overlapping sprays that look from above like miniature glossy ferns or, depending on the eye, antler velvet, hence a cluster of English common names that include elkhorn cedar, staghorn cedar, and dwarf hiba cedar. Turn a spray over and the real surprise appears: the underside of every leaf is marked with a vivid silvery-white stomatal band, painted on like a brushstroke. In sunlight the contrast between glossy emerald above and silver below is the kind of detail that makes a visitor bend down for a closer look. In winter the foliage often takes on bronze or russet tones, especially in colder zones, before settling back to deep green in spring.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBest in part shade in the Southeast, though full sun is fine in cooler climates; in zones 7 and 8 a little afternoon shelter keeps the foliage from looking thin by late summer. Handsome in a Japanese garden, beside a stone basin or lantern, in the foreground of a woodland border, or in a large container, where the measured pace and slow architecture earn more attention than a faster plant could.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA plant for the gardener who has stopped buying for instant impact and started buying for what they want to be looking at in twenty years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAdditional photo courtesy of Oregon State University.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058003513459,"sku":"THUJ-DOLO-NANA-01G","price":36.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Thujopsisdolabrata_Nana_OGSU.jpg?v=1777491330"},{"product_id":"vaccinium-sempervirens","title":"Vaccinium sempervirens","description":"\u003cp\u003eVaccinium sempervirens is one of the rarest plants in this catalog, an evergreen blueberry known in the wild from a single sandy corner of Lexington County, in the Sandhills of South Carolina. A true local endemic, the plant grows along Atlantic white cedar bogs and seepage slopes where the water table sits high and the sand stays acid, and to grow one is to hold a small piece of a landscape almost nobody has seen.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe plant came to botanical attention in 1980, when the botanists D. A. Rayner and J. Henderson described it as a distinct species and gave it the name that honors the first of them, Rayner's blueberry. Later taxonomists, W. B. Kirkman and J. Ballington among them, judged the plant a close cousin of the creeping blueberry rather than a species apart, and reduced it to Vaccinium crassifolium subspecies sempervirens, a reflection of both the kinship and the geographic isolation that set the plant on its own path.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhere the creeping blueberry runs flat along the ground, Rayner's blueberry stands more erect and arching, and carries noticeably larger, glossier, evergreen leaves. In the garden the plant takes the form of a graceful low shrub, trailing or upright to about two feet, hung in spring with the small white bells of the blueberries and, later, with small dark fruit. The evergreen foliage holds year-round interest that few native blueberries can match.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive Rayner's blueberry the moist, acid, sandy, well-drained ground of the wild home, where water moves through but never stands, in full sun to part shade. Use the plant in a native or Piedmont-restoration planting, a collector's bed of southeastern rarities, or a naturalistic border where a storied evergreen groundcover is wanted. For the gardener drawn to the poetry of place, few plants carry so much history in so quiet a form, and every plant grown helps hold a vanishing South Carolina endemic in cultivation. Photos courtesy of Keith Bradley and Michael Kunz.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058007085171,"sku":"VACC-SEMP-01G","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/VacciniumsempervirensKeithBradleyWoodlanders1_2862bf31-204c-4c98-a60d-b2b4dd29a7dc.jpg?v=1751556492"},{"product_id":"vaccinium-darrowii-sebring","title":"Vaccinium darrowii 'Sebring'","description":"\u003cp\u003eDarrow's blueberry is the small-leaved evergreen of the Southern blueberries, a low native of the sandy pinelands of the Deep South, named for George M. Darrow of the United States Department of Agriculture, whose breeding work shaped the modern blueberry. Most plants of the species carry blue-green foliage, but 'Sebring' is a clone Woodlanders found in Highlands County, Florida and selected for the very small, bright green leaves that give the shrub a fine, tidy texture all its own.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eChosen for ornamental quality as much as fruit, 'Sebring' makes an attractive, compact garden subject, dense and neat, carrying the small, bell-like flowers and small edible berries typical of the blueberries. The fine green foliage stays evergreen through the year, a quiet, well-behaved presence at the front of a bed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the wild, Darrow's blueberry grows in the pinelands of the Deep South on sandy, acid soils that drain freely or at least never flood, and 'Sebring' keeps that preference. Give the plant a sunny spot and sharp drainage, and the shrub settles in with little fuss.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUse 'Sebring' in a native plant garden, an edible landscape, or a mixed shrub border, where the fine texture reads against bolder leaves, and grow the shrub in full sun for the best, densest effect. Pair with other acid-loving natives on lean, sandy ground, and enjoy an evergreen blueberry grown as much for foliage as for the modest crop.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058007314547,"sku":"VACC-DARR-SEBR-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Vaccinium_Sebring_2.jpg?v=1746649070"},{"product_id":"vaccinium-arboreum","title":"Vaccinium arboreum","description":"\u003cp\u003eVaccinium 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSmall, glossy, leathery leaves give the sparkleberry a fine, refined texture, coloring red and purple in autumn and holding evergreen in the warm South while dropping farther north. The real treasure, though, is the bark: smooth and exfoliating in cinnamon, brown, and orange, wrapped around branches that twist and lean with age into a living sculpture. A large old sparkleberry, thoughtfully limbed up, has the quiet drama of a well-grown crape myrtle or stewartia, and rewards artistic pruning as few native shrubs do.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn spring the branches hang with small, fragrant, white, bell-shaped flowers, urn-mouthed like all the blueberries and busy with early bees, followed by small black berries. This is a true Vaccinium, but the fruit is dry and hard rather than sweet, prized by birds and wildlife rather than people. Where the berry did enter human use, it was as folk medicine: an astringent decoction of the leaves or bark was taken for sore throats and loose bowels, and the juice for stubborn cases of dysentery, a use rooted in the plant's high tannin content.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive the sparkleberry a sunny to lightly shaded spot in well-drained, sandy, acid soil, where the plant shrugs off heat and drought once settled, and let a specimen develop as a lawn accent, a woodland-edge small tree, or the sculptural anchor of a native planting. Nurseries rarely offer the plant, though the species is native and widespread across the southern states, and gardeners increasingly value the sparkleberry as a tough, higher-pH-tolerant rootstock for cultivated blueberries. Additional photos courtesy of Alan Cressler and Sandy and Andy Wasowski.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058007478387,"sku":"VACC-ARBO-01G","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Vacciniumarboreum-A_C_IMG2662.jpg?v=1744210561"},{"product_id":"vaccinium-crassifolium-wells-delight","title":"Vaccinium crassifolium 'Well's Delight'","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe creeping blueberry is the ground-hugging cousin of the fruiting kinds, a low, evergreen, native groundcover of the Carolina coastal plain that trades height for reach. 'Well's Delight' is a North Carolina State University selection from the southeastern corner of that state, named for the late Dr. B.W. Wells, the pioneering North Carolina ecologist, and set apart by small, shiny leaves even finer than the usual for the species. The botanical name crassifolium means thick-leaved, for the firm little evergreen leaves that line the trailing stems.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRather than a fruit crop, this is a plant grown for cover and texture: a dense, glossy, dark green mat that turns bronze and burgundy through winter cold. Small, white to pink, bell-shaped flowers stud the mat in spring, feeding early bees, and are followed by small dark blue berries that the birds take, edible enough for a passing nibble though never the harvest of a true blueberry bush.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the wild, creeping blueberry runs along the moist, sandy, acid ground of the Carolina coastal plain, where the water table sits high or a slow seepage keeps the soil damp, though the roots never sit in flood. That preference makes the plant a natural evergreen groundcover for a sandy bank, the front of an acid border, a pond-edge slope, or a native and pollinator planting, knitting slowly into a fine, weed-smothering carpet.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive 'Well's Delight' full sun to light shade and the moist, sandy, acid soil the plant favors, and the mat fills in steadily with almost no care. Pair the groundcover with blueberries, pieris, native azaleas, and other acid-loving companions, and let a drift carry the ground where turf or a coarser cover would look heavy. A quiet, refined native that does a great deal of work for a plant so close to the soil.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058007576691,"sku":"VACC-CRAS-WELL-DELI-01G","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-543.jpg?v=1720141582"},{"product_id":"vaccinium-darrowii-john-blue","title":"Vaccinium darrowii 'John Blue'","description":"\u003cp\u003eDarrow's blueberry is the silver-leaved evergreen of the group, a low, fine-textured native of the pine flatwoods and sandy scrub from southern Georgia through Florida to eastern Louisiana. The species honors George M. Darrow, the United States Department of Agriculture scientist whose breeding work built much of the modern blueberry, and the wild plant has passed its own heat tolerance into many of today's Southern highbush cultivars. 'John Blue' is a North Carolina State University selection chosen for looks as much as fruit, and the leaves are the reason.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSmall, fine, and glaucous blue-green, the evergreen foliage gives 'John Blue' a cool, silvered presence that few blueberries can match, held on a naturally dense, tidy frame. The color reads beautifully against darker greens and burgundy foliage, so the plant works as an ornamental first, in a native plant garden, an edible landscape, or a mixed shrub border, and as a fruiting blueberry second.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn spring the branches carry the small, white, bell-shaped flowers typical of the blueberries, mildly fragrant and busy with native bees, followed by small dark blue berries that are edible and as welcome to birds as to gardeners. The crop is modest beside a rabbiteye, but the pollinator and wildlife value is real, and the fruit is a pleasant bonus on a plant grown chiefly for the foliage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNative to the hot, sandy pinelands of the Deep South, 'John Blue' wants full sun and well-drained, sandy, acid soil, and dislikes any spot that stands wet. Give the plant a bright, sharply drained bed, avoid low ground that holds water, and the reward is year-round blue-green structure, spring bloom for the bees, and a touch of Southern heritage in a compact, resilient shrub.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058007707763,"sku":"VACC-DARR-JOHN-BLUE-01G","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/VacciniumJohnBlue_2.jpg?v=1746648968"},{"product_id":"xylosma-congestum","title":"Xylosma congestum","description":"\u003cp\u003eShiny Xylosma is sometimes listed as Xylosma senticosa. It is an attractive heat and drought tolerant evergreen shrub with glossy leaves about 3\" long and 1\" wide. It is much grown in California and the Southwest as a hedge, screen planting, or small tree. The greenish yellow flowers are not conspicuous but fragrant. This plant is uncommon in southeastern U.S. landscapes but has done very well here in our area. It should have a sunny or slightly shaded area with good soil and good drainage. This plant is native to eastern Asia.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42058013737075,"sku":"YLOS-CONG-01G","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DETA-2182.jpg?v=1720141833"},{"product_id":"rhododendron-qbackb","title":"Rhododendron 'QbackB' (Sunbow Solar Flare)","description":"\u003cp\u003eSunbow Solar Flare is the patented name for the azalea catalogued as \u003cem\u003eRhododendron\u003c\/em\u003e 'QbackB' (U.S. Plant Patent 27,083), a deciduous native hybrid bred for the very conditions that defeat most azaleas. The plant traces to a deliberate cross made in 1984 by Robert Edward Lee in Folsom, Louisiana, who set out to combine the fragrance and vivid color of the Gulf Coast's own Florida azalea, \u003cem\u003eRhododendron austrinum\u003c\/em\u003e, with the substance of the Exbury hybrids. A seedling from austrinum open-pollinated with the hybrid 'Gibraltar' was crossed onto 'Chetco', and from that union Lee selected this standout in 1990.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eReleased as one of a three-part Sunbow series of sun-tolerant native azaleas, Solar Flare lives up to the astronomical name. In early to mid spring, ahead of many companions, the shrub lights up with generous trusses of bright yellow flowers washed with a hint of orange, opening from darker orange-red buds so the whole plant reads two-toned, like a flare caught mid-burst. A rich honeysuckle fragrance pours off the trusses. Unusual among azaleas, this selection was chosen for genuine sun tolerance, which lets a gardener use the plant where a woodland azalea would sulk.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBehind the trademark stands one of the South's most beloved wildflowers. The native deciduous azaleas, the wild honeysuckle-azaleas of old country speech, have perfumed springtime woods from the Carolinas to the Gulf for centuries, and \u003cem\u003eRhododendron austrinum\u003c\/em\u003e lends this hybrid both that scent and the golden fire in the petals. The genus name Rhododendron is Greek for rose tree; the older name azalea, from azaleos, meaning dry, hints at the well-drained ground these shrubs prefer. As with all azaleas, the foliage and nectar contain grayanotoxins and are not for eating, a small caution against a great deal of beauty.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDeciduous and upright, reaching roughly four to six feet, Solar Flare suits the sunny edge of a border, a foundation planting with afternoon relief, or a naturalistic sweep among pines where the spring color can carry. Because the plant accepts more sun than most azaleas, a gardener can choose brighter, more open ground, though morning sun with a little afternoon shade still yields the best foliage. Give moist, acidic, well-drained soil, mulch the shallow roots, and pair with ferns, native phlox, and later-blooming shrubs that carry the season forward. Photo courtesy of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42127322906739,"sku":"RHOD-QBAC-SUNB-SOLA-01G","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/IMG_9183_cf1e538a-eb53-4741-b6cd-283ef8870499.jpg?v=1722291766"},{"product_id":"rhododendron-hybrid","title":"Rhododendron 'Sunstruck'","description":"\u003cp\u003e'Aromi Sunstruck' is one of the deciduous azaleas raised by Dr. Eugene Aromi, the Mobile educator whose decades of patient hybridizing gave the Deep South a whole race of heat-tolerant azaleas. Beginning in the late 1960s, Aromi crossed the large, brilliant Exbury and Knap Hill strains with hardy southern natives, above all the Florida azalea, \u003cem\u003eRhododendron austrinum\u003c\/em\u003e, to win big, fragrant flowers on shrubs that could take Gulf Coast summers. He described more than fifty thousand seedlings over a lifetime of work and named only the finest hundred or so; 'Aromi Sunstruck' carries that pedigree of selection.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrue to the name, the flowers arrive like a burst of sunlight. Each tubular, funnel-shaped bloom spreads about one and three-quarter inches across, with wavy-edged lobes of vivid yellow brightened by a warm orange-yellow blotch, and the blossoms gather into loose trusses of roughly fourteen for a full, glowing spring display. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek, while azalea derives from azaleos, meaning dry, a nod to the airy, well-drained woodland these shrubs favor; neither name hints at the sheer wattage of the color.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe southern native azaleas standing behind this hybrid have perfumed springtime forests from Florida to the Carolinas for generations, prized in old gardens as bush honeysuckles for their scent rather than any use in the kitchen or the medicine chest. That distinction matters: like every Rhododendron, the leaves and nectar of 'Aromi Sunstruck' contain grayanotoxins and are not to be eaten by people or animals. This is a plant to admire with the eyes and the nose, not the tongue.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDeciduous and informally upright at four to six feet, 'Aromi Sunstruck' is made for the woodland garden, the shaded border, or an understory spot beneath high-limbed pines and oaks. Morning sun brings out the fullest color while afternoon shade keeps the foliage fresh, and a moist, acidic, well-drained soil with a cool mulch keeps the roots content. Set the shrub among ferns, native phlox, and foamflower, or in a drift with other Aromi azaleas so the warm yellows and oranges can play off one another when spring arrives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42127422324851,"sku":"RHOD-SUNS-01G","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/ScreenShot2024-07-29at7.55.41PM.png?v=1722297751"},{"product_id":"prunus-americana-white","title":"Prunus americana","description":"\u003cp\u003eBefore European settlement reshaped the eastern landscape, \u003cem\u003ePrunus americana\u003c\/em\u003e was a fixture at the forest edge: thicket-forming, thorny, and extravagantly beautiful in early spring when the plum covered itself in white flowers before the leaves had even stirred. The Lakota knew the plum as \u003cem\u003ekañta\u003c\/em\u003e, the Cherokee as \u003cem\u003egunasdv\u003c\/em\u003e, and across dozens of nations from the Great Plains to the Appalachians the tree was considered a plant of genuine importance. The fruits were eaten fresh, dried into cakes, and worked into pemmican, the dense, calorie-rich mixture of dried meat, fat, and fruit that sustained people through long winters and longer journeys. The inner bark was used medicinally, and the dense, close-grained wood was worked into tools. This was not an ornamental plant in the minds of the people who knew it first. The plum was a resource, in the fullest sense.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhat the plum has always been, regardless of who is looking, is spectacular in flower. The blooms open in mid-spring on bare branches, dense, flat-topped clusters of fragrant white flowers that smother the tree before a single leaf appears, feeding native bees and early pollinators at the precise moment they most need foraging. The plums ripen in early summer to clusters of round red fruit, sour-skinned and sweet-fleshed, good fresh and excellent in jams and preserves. Birds find them reliably, and so do people who know to look.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePrunus americana\u003c\/em\u003e is a thicket-forming small tree, suckering steadily into dense colonies, occasionally thorny enough to be genuinely impenetrable, and broadly tolerant of difficult conditions. The plum grows across a remarkable range, from Saskatchewan to Florida, which speaks to an adaptability earned over millennia rather than selected for in a nursery. For a plant with deep roots in this continent's ecology, literally and otherwise, this is the tree.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto courtesy of Rick Webb.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42134186819699,"sku":"PRUN-AMER-01G","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/ScreenShot2024-08-03at3.27.46PM.png?v=1722713350"},{"product_id":"salvia-greggii-cherry-queen","title":"Salvia greggii 'Cherry Queen'","description":"\u003cp\u003e'Cherry Queen' is a North Carolina-bred salvia from one of the most important salvia hybridizers America has produced. The cross is a deliberate one, between \u003cem\u003eSalvia greggii\u003c\/em\u003e, the autumn sage of the Texas and Mexican borderlands, prized for drought tolerance and a six-month bloom, and \u003cem\u003eSalvia blepharophylla\u003c\/em\u003e, a Mexican species whose name, eyelash-leaved sage, comes from the tiny fringe of hairs at the edge of each leaf (Greek \u003cem\u003eblepharon\u003c\/em\u003e, eyelash, and \u003cem\u003ephylla\u003c\/em\u003e, leaves). \u003cem\u003eBlepharophylla\u003c\/em\u003e carries the most saturated, signal-bright red flower in the whole genus, but the plant spreads by stolons in ways most gardeners do not want and resents cold winters, while \u003cem\u003egreggii\u003c\/em\u003e brings the bones and the durability. The breeder who put the two together was Dr. Richard \"Rich\" Dufresne of Candor, North Carolina, an organic chemist who became, more or less by accident, the leading American breeder of woody salvias for the eastern climate. Dufresne died in December 2018, leaving a body of work that includes 'Cherry Chief', 'Maraschino', and this selection, which Plant Delights Nursery called the most brilliant red they had ever seen on any hardy salvia.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe flower is the show: tubular, two-lipped, about an inch long, in a clean saturated cherry-red, not the deeper crimson of a bottlebrush nor the brick of \u003cem\u003eSalvia greggii\u003c\/em\u003e 'Furman's Red', but a sharp, luminous red that reads from across a garden. Bloom begins early, sometimes on the first warm days of April in zone 8, and continues in waves through summer and into fall, with a heavy push from September into November once the autumn sage genetics take over from the \u003cem\u003eblepharophylla\u003c\/em\u003e spring and summer pattern. In humid Southeastern conditions the plants often bloom without pause from April through hard frost. Hummingbirds find the flowers within hours of the first opening, and bees, butterflies, and beneficial wasps work them heavily all season.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe plant is compact and well-mannered, two to three feet tall and about as wide, with a slightly more spreading, semi-prostrate habit than the usual upright autumn sage. The leaves are narrower than most \u003cem\u003egreggii\u003c\/em\u003e selections, dark green and glossy, a \u003cem\u003eblepharophylla\u003c\/em\u003e trait, and carry the small pointed tip that Dufresne named as a diagnostic feature for telling true 'Cherry Queen' from other red-flowered forms in the trade. The foliage is aromatic when crushed, with the soft minty, resinous scent of the woody salvias, lighter than culinary sage. Drought tolerant once established, heat tolerant, and, unusually for a Texas-Mexico salvia, genuinely humidity tolerant, a real advantage in the Southeast where many western sages struggle. Deer and rabbits leave the plant alone.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne note on care: like all the woody salvias of the \u003cem\u003egreggii\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003emicrophylla\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003ejamensis\u003c\/em\u003e group, 'Cherry Queen' is not self-cleaning, and spent flower stalks stay on the plant until removed. The standard approach is a hard cut, by half to two-thirds, in late winter, less precision pruning than a clean reset, which clears the dead tops and triggers the spring flush. Left untouched, the plant still blooms and grows, but the frame turns ragged.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is a plant for the hummingbird gardener who wants the brightest red salvia available, the Southeastern gardener trying to grow xeric Texas-Mexico sages in real Carolina humidity, the collector building a serious \u003cem\u003eSalvia\u003c\/em\u003e collection, and anyone who would like to grow a piece of Rich Dufresne's quiet legacy at home.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44908016435315,"sku":"SALV-GREG-CHER-QUEE-01G","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Salviagreggii_CherryQueen_Woodlanders.png?v=1777501047"},{"product_id":"sinningia-sellovii","title":"Sinningia sellovii","description":"\u003cp\u003eGesneriads are supposed to be houseplants. Somebody should tell \u003cem\u003eSinningia sellovii\u003c\/em\u003e, which comes out of a hard woody tuber the size of a fist, throws arching stems three or four feet long, hangs them with scarlet tubular flowers from early summer until frost, and then dies back to the ground and does the whole thing again the following year in USDA zone 7b. Gardeners who know the family only through florist gloxinias tend to find this genuinely disorienting, which is a good reason to grow the plant near the front gate.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe species is Brazilian, from the drier southern grasslands and rocky ground, and the tuber is the key to everything else. Water is stored underground, the top growth is expendable, and the plant treats winter dormancy as an ordinary annual event rather than a crisis. That combination gives you something unusual: a plant with the flowers of the tropics and the habits of a prairie perennial. The flowers themselves are narrow scarlet trumpets, freckled darker inside, dangling in a long procession down each arching stem, and they are shaped for exactly one visitor. Hummingbirds work the stems steadily from June onward, and in a good year the traffic is the point of the planting.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBoth halves of the name are commemorations. \u003cem\u003eSinningia\u003c\/em\u003e honors Wilhelm Sinning, head gardener at the Bonn botanic garden in the early nineteenth century, who grew and distributed much of what Europe first knew of the family. \u003cem\u003eSellovii\u003c\/em\u003e remembers Friedrich Sellow, the German botanist who spent nearly two decades collecting across Brazil and Uruguay, sent tens of thousands of specimens back to Berlin, and drowned in the Rio Doce in 1831 with most of the work still unpublished. A great many South American plants carry that name; this is one of the better ones to have it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive the plant full sun to part shade in gritty, well-drained ground, and site where people walk, because the flowers hang and want to be seen from below rather than looked down on. A raised bed, a wall top, a slope, or a large container all suit. Water moderately in growth and keep the tuber dry in dormancy; wet winter soil is what kills, not cold. Cut the spent stems to the ground after frost blackens them and mark the spot, since the tuber is slow to wake and easy to dig up by accident in spring. Pair with agaves, gaura, muhly grass, and the drier salvias for a hummingbird corner that carries through the hottest weeks of the year, and expect the whole performance to improve as the tuber thickens with age.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45409809137779,"sku":"SINN-SELL-01Q","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/BF36FB12-C522-4C87-89F9-2FA333F19B53.jpg?v=1787792807"}],"url":"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/collections\/prophouse-spring-2027.oembed?page=3","provider":"Woodlanders","version":"1.0","type":"link"}