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.
Iris brevicaulis is the low, quiet member of a famous clan. One of the five wild species known collectively as the Louisiana irises, the plant carries broad blue to violet flowers on curiously kinked, zigzagging stems, so short that the blooms rarely clear the fan of sword-shaped leaves. Botanists call that back-and-forth habit fractiflex, and the trait gives the plant one of the common names, zigzag iris; the Latin brevicaulis, short-stemmed, records the same feature, while a third name, Lamance iris, honors the American horticulturist Lora La Mance.
Iris cristata is the iris scaled down for the woodland floor, a dwarf native barely six inches high that spreads into low, overlapping fans of bright green blades. In mid to late spring the mats light up with small flowers, an inch and a half to two inches across, in soft lavender-blue to violet, each fall stamped with a white patch and a raised orange or yellow ridge. That ridge is the crest that gives the plant both the Latin name cristata, crested, and the common name crested iris, and the feature sets the species apart from the bearded and beardless irises alike.
Among the wild irises of North America, Iris fulva is the one that broke the color rules. Where the family runs to blues, purples, and yellows, the copper iris opens in warm coppery red to burnt orange, a shade no other native iris offers, carried on slender stems in late spring and early summer with a soft, slightly drooping poise. The Latin fulva, meaning tawny or reddish-brown, records that unusual color, and the common names, copper iris and red iris, say the same thing more plainly.
Iris verna is one of those plants that feels like a secret, small, fragrant, and impossibly charming once noticed. Native to the pinewoods and sandy slopes of the eastern United States, this understated iris has been a spring companion for centuries, brightening forest floors long before gardeners thought to give the plant a place at home.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of the wetlands, streambanks, and floodplains of the eastern United States, from New Jersey to Florida and west to Texas. Sometimes called Virginia willow for the shape of the leaves, though the plant is no willow at all, the species is prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and for a fall display of orange, red, and burgundy that rivals far showier shrubs. 'Henry's Garnet' is the selection that made the species a garden staple, free-flowering, with six-inch white racemes and a deep maroon-purple fall color that gives the plant its name.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, prized for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a brilliant fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Little Henry' is the dwarf of the clan, a low, mounded selection that reaches only about three feet, packing the fragrant flowers and fiery fall color of the full-sized sweetspires into a tidy, compact plant for smaller spaces.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and a fall display of red, orange, and burgundy. 'Longspire' is the selection chosen for its flowers: a form that carries notably long, white racemes, arching sprays of small fragrant blooms that outdo the wild plant for length and presence in early summer.
Itea virginica, the Virginia sweetspire, is a native shrub of eastern wetlands and streambanks, grown for arching, fragrant white flower spikes in early summer and brilliant fall color. 'Sarah Eve' is the exception in the family, the first pink sweetspire: the small flowers are essentially white, but they are carried on rosy-pink pedicels that tint the whole arching raceme a soft, distinctive pale pink, a color no other Itea offers.
Juniperus virginiana, the eastern red cedar, is a tough, aromatic native conifer of eastern North America, found from Canada to the Gulf and famous for fragrant, moth-repelling wood and a pioneering habit on poor, dry, and abandoned ground. 'Lawrenceville' is a narrow, upright selection, a slender column of dense, dark evergreen foliage with short branches held close to the trunk, ideal where vertical form is wanted in a small footprint.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
4–8 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Conifer
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Sheep laurel belongs to the heath family (Ericaceae), kin to the rhododendrons, blueberries, and pieris, and shares that family's love of cool, sour, peaty ground. The genus name honors Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist and student of Linnaeus who traveled the eastern colonies in the 1740s and sent plants and seed back to Uppsala; Linnaeus returned the compliment by fixing his pupil's name to this handsome American genus. The species epithet angustifolia simply means narrow-leaved, while caroliniana marks the southern form described from the Carolinas, distinguished by leaves softly gray-felted on their undersides.
Mountain laurel is the aristocrat of the American heath family (Ericaceae), a broadleaf evergreen native from southern Maine to the Florida panhandle and west toward Indiana and Louisiana, most at home on the acid, rocky slopes of the Appalachians. Linnaeus named the genus Kalmia for his student Pehr Kalm, the Finnish-Swedish naturalist who botanized the eastern colonies in the 1740s, and the species epithet latifolia means broad-leaved. To gardeners the shrub answers to a whole drawer of common names: calico bush for the patterned flowers, spoonwood for the wood, and simply mountain laurel across most of the range.
Of all the patterned mountain laurels, 'Bullseye' plays the boldest trick with color. The cinnamon-purple buds are handsome in their own right, and when they open the flowers reveal a broad band of deep purple-maroon ringing a white throat and a clean white edge, the concentric target that gives this selection a name. 'Bullseye' belongs to Kalmia latifolia, the broadleaf evergreen native to the acid slopes of the eastern United States, and represents the golden era of Kalmia breeding led by Dr. Richard Jaynes at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, whose decades of selection gave gardeners the banded, picoteed, and richly budded laurels grown today.
Most mountain laurels are shrubs with presence, upright and woody and faintly aristocratic. 'Croft Carpet' flips the script. This rare, prostrate selection of Kalmia latifolia stays low and spreads into a dense evergreen mat, delivering the understory finish that designers chase in shade gardens: lush, deliberate, and quietly polished. A specimen at the JC Raulston Arboretum measured only about one foot tall while spreading many times as wide.
'Pristine' is a pure white-flowered mountain laurel, a luminous departure from the pink and rose-flushed forms of the wild species. The selection was discovered in Aiken County, South Carolina by the late Mrs. Ernestine Law and introduced to cultivation by Woodlanders, a distinctive regional expression of one of the most iconic broadleaf evergreens of the eastern United States. Where typical Kalmia latifolia opens blush-toned, 'Pristine' unfurls in clean, brilliant white, a serene presence that reads especially bright planted en masse or set against darker evergreens.
'Willowwood' is a Woodlanders introduction selected from a mountain laurel found growing in Aiken County, South Carolina. What sets this laurel apart at first glance is the foliage: narrow, willow-like leaves that lend the shrub a finer, more linear texture than the broad-leaved wild Kalmia latifolia. In bloom, 'Willowwood' carries pink flowers with distinct banding, gathered in the familiar rounded clusters that make mountain laurel such a valued broadleaf evergreen for woodland gardens.
This seemingly unlikely hybrid crosses the familiar mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) with the diminutive, far less known sandhill laurel (Kalmia hirsuta) of the Deep South, two species that could hardly look more different. The cross was probably first made by the late, great Alabama nurseryman Tom Dodd, Jr., and further investigated by the Connecticut Kalmia expert Dr. Richard Jaynes, whose lifetime of work did more than anyone's to bring the genus into gardens.
Seashore mallow is an erect, branching herbaceous perennial of the cotton family (Malvaceae), the same clan as hibiscus, hollyhock, and cotton, and the kinship shows in the flowers. Native to the brackish and salt marshes of the eastern United States, from New York and Delaware south to Florida and Texas, the species carries hibiscus-like blooms from midsummer well into fall, each a clear five-petaled cup around a central column of fused stamens. This selection, 'Alba', trades the usual soft pink for pure, clean white.
Leucothoe racemosa, the sweetbells of Eastern wetland edges, is a fine native shrub too seldom planted. Found wild across the eastern United States in acidic woodland soils that stay damp but never flood, the plant grows upright and loosely branched to six or eight feet, deciduous to semi-evergreen depending on the winter. Botanists now file the species under the name Eubotrys racemosa, though the older Leucothoe is the name most gardeners still use.
Liatris spicata, the blazing star or gayfeather, sends up rockets of feathery purple in the heart of summer, one of the great vertical accents of the North American prairie. The species is native to the moist meadows, prairies, and wet savannas of eastern North America, where the flower spikes once rose in their thousands among the tall grasses. Set against those horizontal sweeps of grass, the erect, bottlebrush spikes give any planting a jolt of structure and color.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
immune support, respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, digestive health
Few native perennials burn as bright as Lobelia cardinalis, the cardinal flower, whose late-summer spikes of pure, velvety scarlet stop traffic in any garden. The species ranges across much of North America along stream banks, wet meadows, and ditches, and takes the common name from the vivid red of a cardinal's robes. From a low rosette of broad green leaves rises a stiff, unbranched stem hung with tubular flowers built, as luck would have it, precisely to the reach of a hummingbird's bill.
