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.
Large-flowered scarlet calamint is a small, wiry, semi-evergreen subshrub of the Florida sandhills, close kin to the better-known red basil, Clinopodium coccineum, and distinguished chiefly by the size of the flowers. Slender scarlet tubes, generously long, open along the stems from spring through summer and are built precisely for hummingbirds, which find them quickly and come back. The leaves are small, neat and aromatic, throwing a clean mint scent when brushed, and the whole plant stays open and airy rather than dense, better placed at the front of a bed than in the middle of it.
Colquhounia coccinea is a showy, soft-wooded shrub of the mint family, clothed in medium-sized leaves that are downy and pleasantly rough to the touch. Through late summer and fall come dense terminal spikes of orange-scarlet, yellow-throated flowers, a hot late-season color that hummingbirds and pollinating insects work eagerly. Plant in a sunny, well-drained site with good soil, where the arching stems can be trained against a warm wall.
The conradinas are dense, aromatic, low shrubs of the mint family, dressed in small, usually needle-like green or gray leaves and hung with little pale purple flowers. Six or seven species grow wild in the southern United States, most of them in Florida on sand or very sandy soil, and the genus carries an unusual weight of rarity: four species are federally listed, C. brevifolia, C. etonia and C. glabra as endangered and C. verticillata as threatened, with two more carrying state protection in Florida. Conradina canescens is the exception and the common one, a somewhat variable plant of the Gulf Coast dunes of northwest Florida and adjacent Alabama and Mississippi.
Conradina canescens ‘Gray Mound’ is a silver-leaved selection of the false rosemary that grows wild on the deep, pine-fringed sands of the northern Gulf Coast, in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle, where the species holds the back of the primary dunes and runs inland into sand pine scrub. A member of the mint family, this aromatic shrub carries soft, needle-like foliage in a ghostly silver-gray, and from March into November, heaviest in spring, offers pale lavender to bluish two-lipped flowers spotted with dark purple on the lower lip, which native bees work steadily.
This small to medium shrub is in the mint family. It is a small shrub with gray-green narrow Rosemary-like aromatic leaves. The flowers are bluish and larger than other Conradinas. It is native on old dunes and deep sandy soil at scattered locations along the east coast of Florida. It needs a sunny site with well-drained sandy soil. Conradina grandiflora is a federally listed endangered species. NOT FOR SALE IN INTERSTATE COMMERCE
Some years ago we introduced two selections of Conradina collected on the Styx River in southern Alabama, called 'Low Gray' and 'Low Green', and we hope those clones survive in cultivation somewhere still. On a return visit to the Styx River site we gathered several more cuttings from distinctly low-growing plants. This conradina haunts a sandy woodland and cutover near the Styx River, and may well represent a new, as yet undescribed species; what appears to be the same plant turns up some miles east on Blackwater State Forest in northwest Florida. The Styx River plant differs clearly from the taller, more upright Conradina canescens of the open Gulf Coast.
Few native shrubs carry as much quiet history as Croton alabamensis, the Alabama croton, a rarity known in the wild from only a handful of counties along the Cahaba and Black Warrior rivers, where the shrub clings to dry, limestone bluffs. This is a plant of the Southern woodland edge, once more widespread and now treasured wherever a gardener can offer the Alabama croton a home.
This spiny, sprawling, half-vining shrub carries glossy evergreen leaves and a tangle of thorns. Sometimes classified as a Maclura 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.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–8 ft.
Spread
15–30 ft.
Bloom
Green
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
detoxification & cleansing, respiratory support, pain relief, reproductive health
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 plants carry their history as plainly as Danae racemosa. 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.
Winter Daphne is one of the most beloved and most exasperating shrubs in the southern garden, grown for a fragrance that arrives in the dead of winter and carries clear across a yard. In late winter the dense, rounded evergreen opens tight clusters of small, waxy, rose-pink flowers, and the scent, sweet and far-reaching, is the whole argument for growing the plant. This is the non-variegated form, with clear pink bloom and glossy, unmarked deep green leaves.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–5 ft.
Spread
4–5 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
pain relief, topical applications, respiratory support
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.
The genus name comes from the Greek dichroos, meaning "two-colored," and Dichroa versicolor presses the idea further: bloom color shifts with soil chemistry much the way a hydrangea does, swinging from deep cobalt to soft mauve depending on how much aluminum a plant can draw up. The species epithet versicolor only doubles down on the point, promising a shrub that refuses to settle on a single shade.
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.
Dirca 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.
Paper bush, Edgeworthia chrysantha, spends the growing season as a quiet, blue-green shrub and saves the show for the dead of winter. In late winter and earliest spring, while the branches are still bare, the shrub hangs rounded, downward-facing clusters of small tubular flowers from the tips of every stem, silvery-furred buds opening to warm yellow throats that carry a sweet, daphne-like fragrance across cold air. A cousin of Daphne and the native leatherwood Dirca in the family Thymelaeaceae, paper bush shares the tribe's supple, hard-to-snap branches and honeyed scent.
