Southeastern Native Plants

Southeastern Natives

Home ground. Woodlanders was built on the native flora of the Southeastern United States, and this collection gathers it in one place: the trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and ferns that make the Southern landscape what it is.

327 plants in this collection

1979 Catalogue View

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About the Southeastern Natives Collection

This is the ground Woodlanders was built on. For decades the nursery has made a life's work of the native flora of the Southeastern United States, the richest temperate plant community in North America, and this collection gathers that flora in one place. Here are the plants of the Southern woods, swamps, savannas, and sandhills: the trees and shrubs, the wildflowers and ferns, the vines and grasses that make the landscape from Virginia to Florida and west to Louisiana what it is.

There is no better plant for a Southern garden than one that already knows the place. A Southeastern native is adapted to the heat and humidity, the summer storms and the mild winters, the acid soils and the long growing season, in a way no import can match. And because these plants evolved alongside the region's insects, birds, and pollinators, each one earns a place in a living garden: the native azalea feeding the season's first swallowtails, the blueberry and beautyberry carrying songbirds through fall, the oak quietly supporting more caterpillar life than any other tree.

The range is deep. Fragrant deciduous azaleas and mountain laurels for the woodland; oaks, magnolias, and cypress for the canopy; blueberries, hollies, and viburnums for structure and fruit; asters, coneflowers, milkweeds, and blue-stars for the sunny border; and a whole understory of ferns, gingers, and spring wildflowers for the shade. Many are common backbone plants; others are rare endemics found wild in only a county or two. Site each where the conditions genuinely suit them, and a native planting will settle in and largely tend itself.

For the wider continental flora, see our North American Natives. Among our Southern signatures, explore the native azaleas, the blueberries, and the great Canopy Trees.