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.
There is something quietly instructive about the range of Magnolia virginiana. The species runs from the cold, swampy woods of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where a small population clings to the northern edge of the natural territory, all the way down to the Gulf Coast of Texas, a span of climate and geography that would seem to demand two entirely different plants. In the North the sweetbay obliges by turning deciduous, multi-stemmed, and compact, staying modest in deference to the winters. In the South the same species becomes something else entirely, a tall, evergreen tree of real stature. Botanists eventually gave the northern form a name of its own, var. virginiana, and that is what Woodlanders grows here, raised from seed collected at the Massachusetts limit of the range.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
20–40 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, general wellness
'Pam Puryear' is the soft-pink small Turk's cap, a lovely departure from the usual fire-engine red of this tough native mallow. The furled, never-quite-open flowers keep the charming Turk's cap form, less than two inches long and produced without pause through the hot months, but here they glow a gentle shell pink that reads cool and quiet in the summer border.
This is the white-flowered small Turk's cap, an uncommon and quietly beautiful form of the normally scarlet Malvaviscus drummondii. The flowers keep the familiar furled, never-opening Turk's cap shape, under two inches long and produced steadily through the hot months, but open in clean, soft white rather than red, a cool and unexpected note in the summer garden.
Monarda fistulosa, wild bergamot, is one of the great native perennials of the North American prairie, a hardy, aromatic member of the mint family loved for showy heads of lavender-pink and for a fragrance like oregano crossed with mint. The species grows wild in meadows, prairies, and open woods across most of the continent, and brings both vivid summer color and a deep well of history to the garden.
The bayberry candle is one of those traditions so old it has become purely symbolic, burned at Christmas for luck, the scent faint and slightly waxy and unlike anything paraffin has managed to replicate in three centuries of trying. Most people who burn one have no idea what plant produced it, or that the plant is still out there, growing in sandy pocosins and coastal flats from New Jersey to the Gulf, doing quiet work in the margins of the southeastern landscape. That plant is Morella caroliniensis.
Morella pumila 'Willow Leaf' is a distinctive, fine-leaved form of the native dwarf waxmyrtle, selected for narrow, elongated, willow-like leaves that give the low shrub an unusually elegant, airy texture rarely seen in the species. Like the wild plant, this is a low, spreading, colony-forming evergreen of the fire-adapted pinelands of the southeastern United States, once listed as Myrica pusilla and now placed in the genus Morella.
The red mulberry, Morus rubra, is the eastern woodlands' own mulberry, a medium to large deciduous tree native across the eastern United States from New England to Texas. The genus name Morus is simply the old Latin word for mulberry, and rubra, red, points less to the ripe fruit, which darkens to near black, than to the reddish cast of the young growth. Broad, heart-shaped, sandpaper-rough leaves clothe a wide, rounded crown, and where a female tree grows the summer branches hang heavy with blackberry-like fruit.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
40–60 ft.
Spread
25–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Few native grasses put on a show like Muhlenbergia capillaris. For most of the year pink muhly is a modest, upright tuft of fine, wiry, dark green blades, easy to overlook. Then, in the shortening days of autumn, the whole clump erupts into a haze of tiny flowers, an airy cloud of pink to rose-red that seems to hover a foot above the foliage and glows when backlit by low sun. Massed in a drift, the effect is one of the most spectacular in the fall garden.
Nyssa ogeche, the Ogeechee tupelo, is a medium-sized deciduous tree of the southeastern Coastal Plain, at home from southern South Carolina through the Ogeechee valley of Georgia into northern Florida and Alabama. The genus name honors Nyssa, a water nymph of Greek myth, and the tree lives up to the name, thriving along creeks, river swamps, and seasonally flooded bottoms where the soil stays acidic and wet.
Sundrops make a gentle joke of their family. Oenothera fruticosa ssp. glauca belongs to the evening primroses, a tribe famous for opening at dusk and closing by mid-morning, yet the sundrops break ranks and bloom by day, holding cups of clear, satiny yellow wide open through the sunlit hours of late spring and early summer. The genus name comes from the Greek oinos, wine, and thera, to hunt or seek, an old and disputed reference to a European relative whose roots were once thought to give a taste for wine; the epithet fruticosa means shrubby, for the firm, upright stems, and glauca notes the blue-green bloom on the foliage.
Devilwood earns the odd name honestly. Osmanthus americanus carries a wood so cross-grained and stubborn that early woodworkers swore the timber was possessed, and the name has stuck for centuries, a small piece of American folklore hung on an otherwise gracious plant. The leaves are leathery, elliptical, and smooth-margined, a deep glossy green without the spines that arm so many tea olives, and they build into a dense, rounded evergreen of fifteen to twenty-five feet, handsome as screen, understory, or small tree.
Osmunda regalis, the royal fern, is a plant of stature and quiet nobility, at home where the woods remember water and time moves slowly. The genus Osmunda gives its name to an ancient family, the Osmundaceae, sometimes called the flowering ferns, with a fossil lineage that reaches back past the Jurassic; a royal fern in the garden is a living relic of a far older flora. The natural range runs from Nova Scotia to Florida in North America, and on through Europe, Africa, and Asia, making this one of the most widely distributed ferns on earth. Both the common name and the Latin regalis salute the same quality: among the largest and most robust of all North American herbaceous plants, the royal fern reaches four to six feet where truly content.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
3–6 ft.
Spread
3–4 ft.
Plant type
Fern
Traditional use
pain relief, topical applications, respiratory support
Oxydendrum arboreum, the sourwood, is one of the loveliest and most distinctive trees of the Eastern American woods, and among the very last to flower each year. The name tells the story twice over: Oxydendrum joins the Greek oxys, sour or sharp, and dendron, tree, while the common name echoes the same tang, for the leaves, twigs, and bark all taste sourly of oxalic acid when chewed. A member of the heath family alongside azaleas, rhododendrons, and blueberries, sourwood stands alone as the sole species in the genus, native to well-drained, acid woodland soils from southern Pennsylvania to the Florida panhandle and west toward Louisiana, most abundant in the lower Appalachians.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
30–50 ft.
Spread
15–25 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
Few native plants look as improbable as the maypop. Passiflora incarnata, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast, opens intricate three-inch flowers of pale lavender and white, each ringed with a fringed corona of wavy filaments above a central column of stamens and styles. Spanish missionaries read the whole Passion of Christ into that structure, the corona for the crown of thorns, the five anthers for the wounds, the three styles for the nails, and gave the genus its devotional name. Common along field edges and roadsides from Virginia to Florida and west to Texas, the vine climbs by curling tendrils or sprawls across open ground.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
10–25 ft.
Spread
6–10 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
Passiflora incarnata alba is the rare pure white form of the native maypop, the wild passionflower of the American Southeast. The flower keeps all the improbable structure of the species, an intricate three-inch bloom with a fringed corona above a central column of stamens and styles, but drained of every trace of lavender: white petals, white sepals, and a white corona, luminous and cool against the deep green foliage. The effect is a ghostly, refined version of a familiar roadside wildflower.
Hardiness
Zones 7–10
Light
Full Sun
Height
6–15 ft.
Spread
3–6 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Vine
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, digestive health, reproductive health
Persea borbonia, the redbay, is a handsome broadleaf evergreen native to the southeastern United States, ranging from coastal Virginia through Florida and west along the Gulf. A member of the laurel family and a close relative of the avocado, the redbay carries the same aromatic oils, and the glossy leaves have long been used in the southern kitchen much as bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) is, to season soups, stews, and gumbo.
Wild blue phlox turned up in the Woodlanders catalog almost by insisting on it, growing in the woods around Aiken the way the plant has for as long as anyone can remember. We have watched these colonies for years, and taking this long to offer them is either a comment on our patience or on our woody bias. Possibly both.
Phlox pilosa, the downy or prairie phlox, is a native of open woods, prairies, and glades across much of the eastern and central United States, and 'Eco Happy Traveler' is one of the most rewarding garden selections, made for a spreading habit and a long run of clear rose-pink bloom. The soft, downy stems and narrow leaves give the plant the common name, and the whole low mat is topped in late spring by loose clusters of fragrant, five-petaled flowers.
Physostegia virginiana, the obedient plant, is a familiar native of moist meadows and streamsides across eastern North America, and 'Vivid' is the compact, richly colored selection that has become a garden standard. Upright spikes of deep rose-pink, tubular flowers rise on square, mint-family stems in mid to late summer, holding strong color into early fall when much of the border is fading.
Pieris phillyreifolia, the climbing fetterbush, is one of the strangest and most wonderful of Southeastern natives, an evergreen member of the heath family with a habit unlike any other hardy shrub. In cultivation the plant grows as a neat, small evergreen shrub of two to three feet, clothed in narrow, leathery dark green leaves about an inch long.
