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.
Asimina obovata is the bigflower pawpaw, a Florida native that carries the largest, showiest blooms in a genus better known for its fruit. The pawpaws are the temperate outliers of the Annonaceae, the custard apple family whose tropical members include the cherimoya, soursop, and ylang-ylang, and Asimina alone among them ventures north into the sandy uplands of the American Southeast. The genus name descends from an early Native American word for the fruit, carried into English through the French asiminier, while obovata describes the egg-shaped leaves, broadest above the middle.
Aucuba japonica is one of the great problem-solvers of the shade garden, a glossy broadleaf evergreen that thrives in the dry, difficult shade where few other shrubs will, and var. borealis is the toughest of the clan. Drawn from the cold northern reaches of the plant's Japanese range, this small-leaved form was selected for hardiness, holding very shiny, dark green, leathery leaves through winters that would burn a common aucuba. The genus name is a Latin rendering of the Japanese aokiba, for the ever-green leaves.
This is one of the quiet mysteries of the Woodlanders collection, a narrow-leaved evergreen aucuba received years ago from the U.S. National Arboretum under the name Aucuba himalayica, and quite possibly the slender japonica form known as 'Longifolia' instead. Either way the plant is a striking departure from the usual aucuba, trading broad, spotted leaves for long, willow-like, finely serrated blades of glossy dark green. Woodlanders has not seen this aucuba offered anywhere else, which makes the plant a true collector's piece whatever the correct name proves to be.
Baptisia megacarpa, the Apalachicola or bigpod wild indigo, is a rare and remarkable native of the floodplains and forested slopes of the Florida Panhandle, southeastern Alabama, and southwestern Georgia. The species grows on sandy ridges and stream terraces in the Chattahoochee River drainage, finely tuned to that particular corner of the South.
Bejaria racemosa, the tarflower, is one of the odd and lovely surprises of the Florida scrub, a heath-family shrub that looks nothing like the rest of the clan. Where blueberries and azaleas carry small, fused, bell-shaped blooms, tarflower opens wide flowers of seven separate petals, white to soft pink and sweetly fragrant, held in loose summer racemes. The genus honors the eighteenth-century Spanish botanist Jose Bejar, and though older books spell the name Befaria, botanists have since settled on Bejaria.
Buddleia cordata ssp. tomentella is a striking, large evergreen shrub with broad, somewhat heart-shaped leaves in soft gray-green, the lighter undersides flashing in every breeze. First collected by Yucca-Do Nursery near Los Lerios in Coahuila, Mexico, the plant was originally offered by Woodlanders as Buddleia sp. 'Los Lerios', and the true identity was later confirmed by Dr. Jon Lindstrom of the University of Arkansas, a longtime customer and plantsman of note.
Buddleia loricata, the mountain sagewood, is a rugged evergreen from the high Drakensberg of South Africa and Lesotho, and one of the hardiest of all the butterfly bushes. Unlike the familiar deciduous buddlejas, this species holds narrow, crinkled, sage-like leaves the year round, dark green above and felted silvery white beneath. The species epithet loricata means clad in mail or armored, a nod to that tough, quilted foliage, while the genus honors the English clergyman-botanist Adam Buddle.
A seldom-offered evergreen, Buxus balearica is the bold-leaved boxwood: an upright shrub or small tree related to the common boxwood, Buxus sempervirens, but with noticeably larger, glossier leaves. Less cold-hardy than the common box, the Balearic boxwood is a fine choice for warmer gardens, where the big evergreen leaves give a lush, polished presence.
A twisting, weeping take on the classic boxwood, Buxus sempervirens 'Unraveled' breaks the upright, clipped mold of the genus entirely. The branches arch and twist into a loose, cascading, almost sculptural form, dense with the familiar small evergreen leaves but carried on a frame that drapes rather than stands. A selection from the JC Raulston Arboretum, 'Unraveled' brings a wild, playful edge to a plant usually grown for rigid formality.
Callicarpa dichotoma belongs to the mint family, Lamiaceae, though the beautyberries wear their kinship lightly. The genus name comes from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, a promise the plant keeps every autumn, while the epithet dichotoma describes the way the slender branches fork in neat pairs, giving the shrub a tiered, arching silhouette. Native across East Asia, from China and Korea into Japan and Vietnam, the purple beautyberry has long been grown for that moment in late summer when clusters of small violet fruits ripen along the stems and hold on well after the leaves have gone.
Two camellias do most of the work in American gardens, Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua, in countless named forms. The Far East holds far more, and Woodlanders is among the few nurseries offering the lesser-known species to gardeners here. Camellia crapnelliana, the Crapnell camellia, is one of the most distinctive: a slow, upright evergreen first described from Hong Kong Island and named for the collector Crapnell.
Most gardeners who grow camellias know two of them. Camellia japonica opens in winter, C. sasanqua in autumn, and between the two a practiced collector can have flowers from October through March. What happens in April is generally someone else's problem.
Camellia euryoides offers a quiet counterpoint to the camellias most familiar to American gardeners. Where Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua have long defined the genus in cultivation here, those two represent only a sliver of a far broader Asian lineage. C. euryoides, a shrub or small tree of the subtropical forests of Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangxi, belongs to that richer world of species camellias: subtler, finer in texture, and made for gardeners curious about the genus beyond its showiest forms.
Camellia fraterna is a camellia stripped back to wild beginnings, a species from the hills of eastern China far removed from the big, blowsy blooms of the garden japonicas and sasanquas. Where those carry a few large flowers, this one covers slender, upright branches in a snowfall of small, single, white flowers, faintly pink outside and softly fragrant, that arch the stems with their sheer number. The small, pointed evergreen leaves and open, airy habit give the plant an easy, natural grace.
