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.
This is a rare and radiant selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen for flowers of pure, clear yellow. Where the species usually runs to golden-orange, this form holds a clean, buttery, luminous yellow, a color that lights up the spring woodland like sunshine slipping through the canopy. For gardeners and collectors who love the native azaleas, a truly pure-yellow austrinum is an uncommon prize.
Rhododendron canescens, the Piedmont azalea, is very likely the most widespread of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Southeast, ranging through the Piedmont, coastal plain, and stream edges from the mid-Atlantic to the Gulf. Country people have long called the plant the Southern pinxter or simply wild honeysuckle, for the sweet, honeysuckle-like scent of the flowers. The species name canescens means becoming gray or hoary, a reference to the soft gray down that coats the undersides of the leaves and the new growth.
'Clyo Red' is a striking red-flowered selection of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, a species usually seen in soft pink and white. Here the wild pink is deepened to a rich cherry-red, an uncommon and eye-catching tone among the native azaleas, carried on the same fragrant, early-spring frame that makes the Piedmont azalea so beloved. The name points to Clyo, a small community in Effingham County, Georgia, near the plant's Southern home.
'Varnadoe's Pink' is a choice dark-pink selection of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, chosen and grown by the late Aaron Varnadoe of Colquitt, Georgia, a great native-azalea grower and genuine Southern character. Where the wild species varies from pale to deep pink, this selection holds a rich, abundant dark pink, and the plant has become a popular favorite for that reliable color and a good habit and foliage. The selection is sometimes sold under the name 'Varnadoe's Phlox Pink'.
Rhododendron colemanii, the Red Hills azalea, is one of the most recently recognized of all the native deciduous azaleas, first described as a distinct species only in 2008. For years the plant was folded in with the Alabama azalea, Rhododendron alabamense, which blooms earlier and holds consistently white, yellow-blotched flowers; the Red Hills azalea, by contrast, flowers later and in a wider range of color. The species takes its home ground from the Red Hills country of the inner coastal plain, a narrow range across southwest Georgia and southern Alabama.
Among the most beloved of the eastern wild azaleas, Rhododendron periclymenoides drifts through the open woods and swamp margins of the eastern United States from New Hampshire and Massachusetts south to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, opening clouds of pink bloom just as the woodland wakes in spring. This selection breaks from the ordinary pink of the species: a soft lavender-purple color form discovered in Lancaster County, South Carolina, and introduced by Woodlanders, uncommon in the wild and rarer still in cultivation. Botanists once filed the species under the name Rhododendron nudiflorum, and the plant still answers to that older label in many an old garden book.
The native deciduous azaleas of the southeastern United States bloom in a long relay, from the pinxters and Piedmont azaleas of March through the flame azaleas of April and May and on into July with the red of Rhododendron prunifolium. And then, once most gardeners have closed the azalea chapter for the year, Rhododendron serrulatum opens. Hammocksweet azalea is the last of the line, flowering in August and September and sometimes later still.
The glaucous swamp azalea is a native deciduous shrub of the wetland South and the eastern seaboard, a blue-leaved form of Rhododendron viscosum, the widespread swamp azalea that ranges from the Gulf Coast north into New England. The variety glaucum sets the plant apart with foliage washed in a soft blue-green, most striking on the leaf undersides, which flash pale as a breeze turns them. Where many shrubs falter, this azalea thrives in the consistently moist, even boggy ground of swamps, marshes, and stream banks.
Fragrant sumac is a versatile deciduous shrub native across much of the eastern and central United States, where the plant threads scattered woodlands, rocky slopes, and open banks. The trifoliate leaves, often mistaken at a glance for poison oak, are entirely harmless, and a crushed leaf releases the clean, lemony-resinous scent that gives the plant every one of the common names, from fragrant sumac to skunkbush, depending on the nose. The genus name Rhus is the old Greek and Latin word for the sumacs, and the epithet aromatica names the scent directly.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Few native trees announce themselves as cheerfully as Sassafras albidum, whose leaves come in three shapes on the same branch: an unlobed oval, a two-lobed mitten, and a three-lobed silhouette like a splayed hand. A member of the laurel family, Lauraceae, and kin to bay, cinnamon, and spicebush, sassafras carries aromatic oils in every part, so that a snapped twig or crushed leaf releases a warm, root-beer sweetness. The common name traces back through Spanish to the colonial Southeast, where the tree was among the first American plants shipped to Europe as a marketable medicine.
American snowbell is one of the quiet delights of the Southeastern wetlands, usually a graceful multi-stemmed deciduous shrub, though the plant can be trained up into a small single-trunked tree. Along streamsides and in low, wet ground from the coastal plain through the interior South, the shrub carries slender branches that hang, in spring, with rows of small, bell-shaped white flowers, faintly fragrant and nodding on fine stalks so the whole plant seems trimmed in tiny lanterns.
American basswood is one of the great shade and honey trees of eastern North America, a fast, stately deciduous tree with large, heart-shaped, softly toothed leaves and a broad, rounded, generous crown. Tilia americana has been cherished by Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and naturalists alike, and goes by a string of names: linden, bee tree, and lime, though the tree is no relation to the citrus lime. In late spring and early summer, hanging clusters of pale yellow, sweetly fragrant flowers open and hum with bees.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
60–80 ft.
Spread
20–30 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, respiratory support, digestive health
There are few sights more stirring than a wisteria in bloom, and 'Amethyst Falls' offers all the romance without the unruly habits of the Asian cousins. This refined selection of the native American wisteria, Wisteria frutescens, pours out cascades of fragrant, lavender-violet blossoms in late spring, with smaller flushes through summer, a soft echo of springtime returning again and again.
For the first sixty-five years in the books, this vine was filed as a kind of soybean. Linnaeus named the plant Glycine frutescens in 1753, frutescens meaning turning shrubby, and there the classification sat until 1818, when Thomas Nuttall looked again, decided a woody climber of the southern riverbanks deserved a genus apart, and named the vine for his friend Caspar Wistar, the Philadelphia anatomist. Somewhere between the man and the plant a vowel slipped, Wistar becoming Wisteria, and the misspelling has outlived everyone involved.
Some years ago the late Lynn Lowery, a pioneer of Texas native plants, found a fine selection of native wisteria near the dam of an East Texas reservoir. The dam was known as Dam-B, and Lynn gave that name to the plant, though some contend the true name was Damn Bee. Woodlanders thanks Dr. David Creech of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, for the start of this and several other fine plants.
A rare white form of the well-behaved native. Wisteria frutescens var. nivea is a twining, woody, deciduous vine with compound leaves and short clusters of pure white flowers that open with the foliage, far less rampant than the common Asian wisterias and, in white, a genuine rarity. This form was virtually unknown to American gardeners until Woodlanders brought the plant into the trade.
The white form of the latest-blooming native. Wisteria macrostachya 'Clara Mack' is a twining, deciduous Kentucky wisteria with compound leaves and long, hanging clusters of pure white flowers, a splendid white version of a species normally blue. The racemes run longer and open later than those of the other native, Wisteria frutescens, extending the native wisteria season.
A rare gem of the Southeastern coastal plain, chosen for the bluest foliage of the tribe. Zenobia pulverulenta 'Woodlanders Blue' is a semi-evergreen shrub of the heath family, native to the pocosins and pine savannas of the coastal Carolinas, and grown above all for striking powder-blue, glaucous foliage and hanging clusters of white, bell-shaped flowers in early summer. Woodlanders selected and introduced this exceptionally blue form, which has since won wider recognition.
A native lily that answers the rain. Zephyranthes atamasco, the atamasco lily or rain lily, is a bulbous perennial of the amaryllis family, native to moist woods and meadows of the Southeastern United States. The name atamasco comes from the Powhatan people of the Virginia tidewater, an old word carried into botany, and the plant has also long been called Easter lily for the season of bloom.
