The shrubs that furnish a garden. Small and medium shrubs are the versatile, human-scaled woody plants that fill borders, edge paths, and knit the taller structure to the ground, the layer most gardens rely on most.
Once thought lost to time and development, Cyrilla arida, known as Scrub Titi, is a botanical rarity with a story as striking as the summer bloom. The famed botanist J.K. Small first described this shrub in the early twentieth century from the desert-like scrub of central Florida. For decades the identity of Scrub Titi was debated and any wild presence uncertain, until a dedicated search led to rediscovery by Kenneth Wurdack and the Woodlanders team in Highlands County, Florida. That tiny remnant population may now be gone, and Cyrilla arida may no longer exist in the wild, which makes every plant in cultivation all the more precious.
Cyrilla parviflora, the Littleleaf Cyrilla, is a small, understated shrub that carries the quiet resilience of the southeastern wetlands. A close relative of the larger Cyrilla racemiflora, this plant offers a finer, more delicate presence, with slender glossy leaves and airy clusters of tiny white flowers.
Cyrilla parvifolia 'Small Leaf' is a rare, fine-textured native selection that we collected in Franklin County, Florida, prized for the distinctly small, evergreen leaves and the delicate, branching habit. Though sometimes grouped botanically with Cyrilla racemiflora, the more widespread Coastal Titi, this selection stands apart in both form and foliage, an easy standout in native and ornamental plantings alike.
'Graniteville' is a low, ground-hugging selection of Cyrilla racemiflora, the native Titi, and one of the more distinctive forms of a plant already known for variability. Where the species can build into a small tree, this Woodlanders introduction stays wide and knee-high, and the story behind the plant is a piece of local botanizing: we propagated 'Graniteville' from an almost prostrate individual found years ago on an eroded sandhills seepage slope near Graniteville, South Carolina, and the ground-hugging habit has held true ever since in cultivation.
Few garden shrubs carry a resume like Dichroa febrifuga. In the ground this is a handsome, medium evergreen with lacecap heads of small blue flowers in late spring and, better still, clusters of berries in fall that ripen to an almost unreal iridescent, metallic blue, the kind of structural color usually reserved for beetles and tropical birds. A relatively recent introduction from China, the plant sits close enough to Hydrangea, in the family Hydrangeaceae, that the same trick applies: acidic soil deepens the flowers and fruit to true blue, while alkaline ground pushes them toward pink.
Dicliptera suberecta is a member of the acanthus family, Acanthaceae, and hails from the grasslands of Uruguay and Argentina, a heritage that shows in a love of heat, sun, and lean soil. Gardeners know the plant by two names that between them tell the whole story: Uruguayan firecracker plant, for the volley of tubular blooms, and hummingbird plant, for the traffic those blooms draw.
A relic of the old Southern wilds, Erythrina herbacea, the coral bean, is a plant that commands attention, graceful yet defiant, wild yet refined. A legume native across the coastal Southeast, the coral bean shifts habit with the winter: in frost-free zones the plant grows as a woody shrub, branching boldly above the ground, while farther north the top dies down with the first hard freeze, only to rise again from a thick, gnarled rootstock when the heat returns, an emblem of Southern resilience.
The 'De Soto' coral bean is an extremely rare white-flowered form of the familiar southeastern native Erythrina herbacea, whose usual dress is fire-engine scarlet. Where the wild coral bean lights the spring with red, this selection raises the same slender, tubular spires in clean, cool white, a startling and lovely departure that Woodlanders introduced some years ago and is pleased to offer again.
Fothergilla gardenii is a small deciduous shrub, usually three to four feet tall, and a native of the southeastern coastal plain, where the plant haunts moist, peaty pinelands and bogs. A member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, and a close cousin of the witch-hazels themselves, dwarf fothergilla shares the family gift for honey-scented late-winter and spring bloom on bare or barely-leafed stems.
Grevillea rosmarinifolia is a fine-textured Australian evergreen, a rounded to semi-prostrate shrub whose narrow, deep green leaves look uncannily like rosemary, giving the plant both the species name and a handsome, needled presence the year round. The likeness is only skin-deep, for this is a member of the protea family, Proteaceae, worlds away from any herb.
Firebush earns the name honestly. From late spring until the first frost, the arching branch tips carry tight clusters of slender tubular flowers in hot orange-red, each one a narrow torch held out for the hummingbirds and butterflies that work the plant from morning to dusk. The foliage plays along: new leaves and stems flush bronze to burgundy, the veins stained red, so that even between flushes of bloom the whole shrub reads warm. Few plants pull in as much winged traffic through the heat of a southern summer.
'Mariesii' is a piece of hydrangea history still in commerce. In the late 1870s the English plant hunter Charles Maries, collecting in Japan for the famous Veitch nursery, sent home the first lacecap hydrangea to reach the West, at a time when European gardeners knew only the round mopheads. That introduction, named 'Mariesii' in his honor, opened Western eyes to the wild, flat-topped grace of the lacecap and became the parent of a whole line of classic cultivars, among them 'Mariesii Grandiflora', 'Mariesii Lilacina', and the blue 'Mariesii Perfecta'.
Hypericum densiflorum earns the name densiflorum, densely flowered, in high summer, when the twiggy shrub disappears under rounded clusters of small golden flowers, each one a starburst of fine stamens above five clean yellow petals. Bees work the blooms from July into September, and as the show fades the narrow dark green leaves turn a warm yellow, giving way in winter to reddish, lightly peeling bark on the older stems.
Hypericum edisonianum is a Florida endemic with an upright, colony-forming habit, sending up reddish-brown stems clothed in small, leathery, gray-green leaves and topped in the warm months with four-petaled yellow flowers, each brushed with a dense tuft of stamens. As the stems age the bark peels away in thin strips, a subtle textural detail on a shrub that spreads by clonal growth into a low thicket.
Hypericum kalmianum is the tidy, cold-hardy member of the clan, a compact rounded shrub barely knee-high, densely branched, with narrow bluish-green leaves set in pairs along curiously four-angled stems. From July into September the plant disappears under bright golden flowers, each a shallow cup filled with a full boss of stamens, the bloom arriving in the heat of summer when the color is most welcome.
Hypericum lloydii is one of the fine-textured St. John's Worts, a low, wiry evergreen shrub clothed in needle-like leaves so slender that the plant carries a heathery, almost coniferous look. Through the summer the stems light up with showy yellow flowers, each a shallow cup packed with stamens, held above foliage that stays green through the year.
Hypericum myrtifolium is the tidy, blue-leaved member of the group, an evergreen shrub whose small, leathery leaves clasp the stems in neat overlapping ranks and carry a soft glaucous, blue-green cast. In summer the bushy little frame fills with bright yellow flowers, each one a shallow cup brimming with stamens, the show carried on a plant that looks more like a miniature tree than a scrambling subshrub.
Hypericum prolificum lives up to the name, prolific, disappearing each summer under a heavy crop of bright yellow flowers, each three-quarters of an inch to an inch across and stuffed with a golden brush of stamens. The shrub is dense and rounded, with arching branches, narrow shiny leaves, and reddish, exfoliating bark that peels to show paler layers once the foliage thins.
Hypericum stans is the four-petaled member of the family, a small, upright shrub to about three feet with broad, clasping, blue-green leaves and shreddy, peeling bark. Through summer the stems carry bright yellow flowers an inch across, and where most St. John's Worts open five petals, these show four, set in a neat cross above a pair of large leafy sepals.
Ilex glabra 'Nigra' is the inkberry chosen for good looks in every season, a compact, rounded evergreen holly with unusually rich, dark green leaves. Where the wild inkberry can bronze and dull through a hard winter, this selection was picked to hold a deeper, cleaner green, and the smooth, spineless foliage stays handsome on a tidy frame that runs lower and denser than the run of the species.
