A 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.
Florida yew is one of the rarest conifers in North America, a shrubby evergreen restricted to a single stretch of steep, cool ravines along the eastern bluffs of the Apalachicola River in the Florida Panhandle, and nowhere else on Earth. A shrub or small tree of the shaded understory, the plant carries flat, soft, dark-green needles and, on female plants, the fleshy scarlet arils that mark every yew.
Thelypteris acuminata is a handsome evergreen fern from the woodlands of Japan and eastern Asia, grown for glossy green fronds that arch softly and hold their color through the year. Unlike the many deciduous ferns that vanish in winter, this species keeps a steady, structural presence in the shaded garden, one of the reasons the plant is prized where an evergreen fern is wanted.
This rare Hemlock from Yunnan Province in China was originally received from the Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts. It had been obtained from China but was not expected to be hardy in Massachusetts. It proved to be very well adapted to semi-shady situations here in the Deep South where it has become a dark green graceful pyramidal tree. Woodlanders has probably been the first U.S. nursery to offer this tree.
Blackhaw Viburnum is an attractive small tree with oval leathery deciduous leaves and showy flat topped clusters of white flowers followed blue fruits which are attractive to birds. It has very interesting almost black checkered bark on the trunks. Plant in sun or semi shade. Soil should be well drained. This Viburnum is native to eastern U.S. and it becomes a small tree.
A rain lily that flowers on a whim of the weather. Zephyranthes fosteri, Foster's pink rain lily, is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to Mexico and hardy in the warm South, grown for vivid, crocus-like pink flowers that appear as if overnight after summer and autumn rains.
