262 plants in this collection
A conifer of mist and mountains, Podocarpus parlatorei comes from isolated cloud-forest ridges just east of the Andes in Bolivia and northwestern Argentina. Rare in the wild and scarcely seen in cultivation, this CITES-listed species is one of the most unusual evergreen introductions Woodlanders has ever offered.
Polygala x dalmaisiana, the sweet pea shrub, is a fast-growing evergreen hybrid of two South African species (P. oppositifolia and P. myrtifolia), grown for a nearly year-round show of orchid-like flowers on an open, informal frame.
There are pomegranates grown for fruit, and pomegranates grown for flowers, and then there is 'Eight Ball', grown for sheer astonishment. Where the species bears globes the color of garnets, Punica granatum 'Eight Ball' ripens fruit so dark, round, and dusky that the pomegranates look dipped in coal, closer to the ball the cultivar is named for than to anything in the produce aisle. The color runs bone-deep: the fruit is so loaded with anthocyanin pigment that even the cambium beneath the bark shows purple.
Sabal tamaulipensis is a solitary fan palm from the dry limestone hills of northeastern Mexico, where the species climbs the San Carlos Mountains of Tamaulipas and neighboring Nuevo Leon. Stiff, rounded, blue-green fans are held on arching stalks above a trunk that stays short for many years, so young plants read as a fountain of palmate leaves close to the ground. In habitat the palm can eventually reach fifteen to twenty feet, though cultivated plants are slow and often stay compact, and older specimens sometimes recline on a horizontal trunk rather than standing straight. Small, fragrant, creamy flowers give way to round black fruit in the wild.
Some plants arrive with a pedigree, and some arrive with a person. This one came to us from Ken Wurdack, a botanist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and his work centers on the systematics and evolution of the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae. He's the sort of botanist who describes entirely new genera in the tribe Hippomaneae, which happens to be the exact tribe Sebastiania sits in. So this is a spurge handed over by a man who names spurges for a living, which is about the best reference a euphorb could ask for.
Important: This plant is sold within South Carolina only.In the high-gradient streams of the southern Appalachians, the Gauley, the Bluestone, the Greenbrier, scattered tributaries of the New River, and a handful of similar second- and third-order rivers, grows a shrub that holds on to rocky bars and scoured banks where almost nothing else can. This is Spiraea virginiana, the Appalachian spiraea, a plant that evolved alongside the violent flood regime of these mountain rivers and depends on that disturbance. The floods scour competing vegetation off the banks, expose mineral soil for germination, and break off rhizome fragments that float downstream to colonize new sites. Where the rivers were dammed, the floods stopped, and the spiraea began to disappear.
Luzon viburnum is one of the quiet unknowns of Southern gardening, a handsome large shrub grown around Houston for years and almost nowhere else in the United States. Woodlanders collected this plant in the Houston area, where the species had already proven durable and undemanding in Gulf Coast heat. Viburnum luzonicum comes from open forest, scrub, and roadside thickets across southern China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and the epithet points to Luzon, largest of the Philippine islands, from which Robert Allen Rolfe described the species at Kew.
Weeping Dragon is a citrus bred for the eye rather than the fruit bowl, and a young one by citrus standards. Dr. Kim Bowman of the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Fort Pierce, Florida, released the plant in 2016 from a cross of two of the oddest forms in the whole family: 'Flying Dragon', the contorted trifoliate orange whose twisting branches and curved thorns are said to resemble a dragon's claws, and 'Cipo', a sweet orange whose limbs arch over and trail toward the ground. Bowman had spent years working out how that weeping habit passes from parent to seedling. This is where the work landed.
Woodlanders has long been a leader in offering citrus and citrus hybrids hardy well beyond the usual citrus belt, and the 'Razzlequat' is one of the odder and hardier of the lot. The plant is a cross between the Australian desert lime, Eremocitrus glauca, a tough, drought- and cold-tolerant native of the arid Australian interior, and, most likely, the familiar 'Meyer' lemon. From the desert lime parent come thorny, wiry branches, small narrow gray-green leaves, and a hardiness and drought tolerance rare among citrus; from the lemon come size and flavor.
A modern Franklin tree with year-round presence and late-summer perfume. ×Schimlinia 'Schima Lina Ding Dong' is a rare intergeneric hybrid bred to capture the romance of the lost Franklin tree while adding real garden durability. Raised by the Mountain Crop Improvement Lab at NC State, the selection crosses Franklinia alatamaha, the legendary Georgia native long gone from the wild and famous for luminous white flowers, with Schima remotiserrata, a broadleaf evergreen of the tea family from Asia. The result is an elegant evergreen carrying fragrant, white, camellia-like blooms in late summer, just when the garden most wants a fresh highlight.
A seldom-seen species with old-world charm, Abelia chinensis is a deciduous shrub native to China and one of the foundational parents of the widely grown Abelia x grandiflora. Far less common in American gardens than its hybrid offspring, the true species offers its own quiet distinctions: larger foliage, a fuller habit, and a long summer season of bloom that makes it a thoughtful choice for collectors and pollinator gardeners alike.
Abeliophyllum is a genus of a single species, first described from Korea in 1919 and grown in Western gardens since the 1930s, when it earned an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society. It belongs to the olive family beside lilac and forsythia, and in the wild it clings on at only a handful of Korean sites, where it is now protected by law as an endangered plant. This is the white-flowered species itself, the parent of the better-known pink form.
The yellowwoods are to South Africa roughly what the live oaks are to the Lowcountry: the tree everyone knows, the tree in the old photographs, the tree the furniture was made from. Afrocarpus falcatus, the Outeniqua yellowwood, is the tallest of them, a conifer of coastal and montane forest from the Eastern Cape north through Mozambique and Malawi, reaching thirty to sixty feet in cultivation and a great deal more in the deep forest at Tsitsikamma. The famous specimens live for centuries and carry trunks two or three feet through. Yellowwoods collectively are treated as South Africa's national tree, and cutting one is regulated by law.
Seaside alder is a medium to large deciduous shrub, sometimes a small tree, with glossy, oval, toothed leaves and a habit of doing things backward. Where every other native alder flowers in spring, Alnus maritima opens elongated catkins in the fall, then carries small, woody, pinecone-like fruits through winter for quiet ornament.
A hardy evergreen ginger of unsettled name, this Alpinia forms dense, upright clumps of lance-shaped leaves that hold their fresh green right through the year in a mild climate, bringing a lush, tropical structure to the shade garden. In the warm months, bright yellow flower spikes rise above the foliage for an unexpected lift of color in deep shade.
Among the rarest of the serviceberries, Amelanchier nantucketensis is a low, thicket-forming shrub that Eugene Bicknell first described in 1911 from the sandplains of Nantucket, the Massachusetts island whose name the plant carries. Nantucket serviceberry belongs to a small, taxonomically slippery group within the rose family, so closely tangled with neighboring shadbushes that botanists have argued for more than a century over whether this is a true species or a stabilized hybrid. What sets the plant apart is disarmingly small: petals shorter than those of any other serviceberry in the Northeast, often dusted with pollen along their own margins, a quirk called andropetaly that appears nowhere else in the group.
Smooth false indigo is a rare deciduous shrub of sandy southern streambanks, carrying pinnate, compound leaves whose leaflets are notably large and rounded, a softer, more luxuriant texture than the ferny foliage of the common false indigos. In early summer the branch tips raise slender spikes of tiny blue to purple flowers, each lit with the bright orange anthers typical of the genus.
Most bluestars are smooth, cool customers; Amsonia ludoviciana is the outlier of the group. The Louisiana bluestar belongs to the dogbane family, Apocynaceae, and shares the clan's five-petaled, star-shaped flowers and milky sap, but the leaves set the species apart: narrow and willowy, and unusually clothed beneath with a grey-white felt, a woolly tomentum that catches the light and lends the whole plant a soft, silvered cast rare in the genus. In spring, clustered flowers of a clean sky-blue open at the tips of the upright stems, quiet and steely and worked over by the first butterflies of the season.
Araucaria angustifolia is a living relic, one of the last of an ancient conifer family that shaded the dinosaurs across the supercontinent of Gondwana. The Paraná pine belongs to the Araucariaceae, kin to the Chilean monkey puzzle, the Norfolk Island pine, the Australian bunya, and the famously rediscovered Wollemi pine, a lineage once spread worldwide and now scattered mostly across the Southern Hemisphere. Despite the common name, the tree is no true pine at all, but something far older and stranger, holding stiff, sharp, dark green leaves on the branch for a decade or more.
Ardisia japonica 'Hakuokan' is a jewel of the Japanese shade garden, a low evergreen groundcover whose small, glossy, leathery leaves are edged in a clean band of creamy white. The green species, called yabukoji in Japan and marlberry in English, has grown wild in the woodland understory of Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan for ages, spreading quietly by underground runners into knee-low colonies. 'Hakuokan', a name that reads roughly as white royal crown, is a variegated selection prized by collectors, slower and more compact than the plain species and all the more luminous for the pale margin that catches light in a dim corner.
