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.
Quercus acerifolia is one of the rarest oaks in North America, and one of the most quietly beautiful. The name says the first thing you notice: acerifolia means maple-leaved, and the upper leaves really do look like a sugar maple's, often as wide as they are long, cut into three to five sharp, glossy lobes that turn deep red and burgundy in fall. A close relative of the Shumard oak, maple-leaf oak grows as anything from a stunted, multi-trunked shrub on a windswept ridge to a single-trunked tree of forty or fifty feet in cultivation.
Quercus alba, the white oak, is the grandfather of the eastern forest, a slow, massive, long-lived tree that can stand for centuries and outlast the people who plant them. The most famous of all was the Wye Oak of Wye Mills, Maryland, a single white oak that stood for more than four hundred and sixty years and served as Maryland's state tree until a storm brought the giant down in 2002. The broad, rounded crown, the pale, scaly, ash-gray bark, and the deeply lobed, blue-green leaves are the picture most people carry of an oak.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
50–80 ft.
Spread
50–80 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, respiratory support
This oak is named for a doctor who loved plants more than medicine. Alvan Wentworth Chapman practiced in Apalachicola, on the Florida panhandle, and botanized the Gulf coast so thoroughly that his Flora of the Southern United States, published in 1860, stood for decades as the book on the region's plants; this scrub oak carries his name in thanks.
This is one of William Bartram's oaks. He came upon the tree on his travels through the southeastern backcountry in the 1770s, and the botanical name still carries his hand, Quercus hemisphaerica Bartram ex Willd., the species epithet meaning half-a-globe, for the little domed cap that sits like a skullcap on the acorn.
The name is the whole description: incana means hoary, gray-haired, and bluejack oak wears a coat of fine pale hairs that turns the foliage a soft blue-gray, almost silver in some lights, unusual in a genus that mostly trades in greens.
Turkey oak earns the name from the leaf, three-lobed and clawed and splayed exactly like the track a wild turkey leaves in sand, which is fitting, because sand is where these trees live. Quercus laevis is the signature oak of the deep sandhills, the droughty white-sand ridges of the longleaf country from the Carolinas to the Gulf, ground so poor and so hot that most trees simply decline the invitation.
This oak is named for a woman the botanist married. William Willard Ashe, the tireless North Carolina forester who described hundreds of southern trees, set the species down as Quercus margaretta in honor of Margaret Henry Wilcox, whom he would wed in 1905; few oaks carry so personal a dedication.
This oak carries the name of a Pennsylvania parson. Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg was a Lutheran minister who botanized on the side, thoroughly enough that the German-American botanist George Engelmann named the species for him, and then misspelled it: Engelmann set an umlaut over the u that Muhlenberg never used, and the rules of botanical naming have fossilized the slip ever since, transliterating it into the tongue-twisting muehlenbergii we are stuck with.
Myrtle oak takes the name from the leaf, small and leathery and rolled at the edges like a true myrtle, which is about as far from the broad, lobed oak of the schoolbook as the genus travels. Quercus myrtifolia is a creature of the Florida scrub and the sand-pine ridges along the southeastern coast, the bright, fast-draining places where the salt comes in on the wind and the soil is mostly quartz.
Few oaks in North America are rarer. Quercus oglethorpensis went unnoticed by science until 1940, when the botanist Wilbur Duncan described the tree from material gathered in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, and gave the species the county's name. Even now Oglethorpe oak is known from only a scattering of stands across the Georgia and South Carolina Piedmont, with far-flung outliers in Louisiana and Mississippi, and the species sits on every serious list of oaks of conservation concern.
Nuttall oak is named for Thomas Nuttall, the restless English-American naturalist who botanized the young United States more thoroughly than almost anyone of his generation. Long known as Quercus nuttallii, the tree now carries the name Quercus texana in most botanical usage, a change that has caused no end of confusion, since the name once belonged to a different oak. Whatever the label, this is a large deciduous red oak of the Southern bottomlands, at home in the floodplain forests of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi valley.
Few trees carry the weight of the South the way the live oak does. Quercus virginiana is the massive, broad-spreading, long-lived evergreen oak of the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas, the tree of avenues and old plantations, of moss-hung branches reaching low and wide over generations of the same ground. Given room and time, a live oak grows far wider than tall, the great limbs sweeping out and often down to rest on the earth, and the whole tree becomes a piece of living architecture. Georgia named the live oak the state tree, and ancient specimens are landmarks across the Deep South.
The Southern live oak needs no introduction in the coastal South, where the great, spreading, moss-draped evergreens are as much a part of the landscape as the light. Quercus virginiana 'Bok Tower' begins from that familiar species but carries an unusual story and, perhaps, an unusual future.
Rhododendron alabamense, the Alabama azalea, is one of the loveliest and, by wide agreement, one of the most powerfully fragrant of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Southeast. The species grows in hardwood forests and along dry slopes and ridges from north-central Alabama east through western Georgia and into South Carolina, where in mid spring the woods fill with the scent of lemon. Clusters of six to ten white, funnel-shaped flowers, each marked with a clear yellow blotch and finished with long, arching stamens, open just before or alongside the emerging leaves. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek, while azalea derives from azaleos, meaning dry, a nod to the well-drained upland ground these shrubs favor.
Rhododendron arborescens, the sweet or smooth azalea, is one of the hardiest and most graceful of the native white azaleas, a tall, loosely branched deciduous shrub of the eastern mountains and piedmont. The common name smooth azalea points to the hairless, glossy twigs and leaves that set the species apart from woollier kin, while sweet azalea speaks to the flowers, which pour out a rich heliotrope perfume. The species epithet arborescens is Latin for becoming tree-like, a fair description of an old plant that can reach ten to eighteen feet, and the genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek.
Rhododendron atlanticum, the coastal or dwarf azalea, is a low, colony-forming native of the open pine woods and sandy flatwoods of the mid-Atlantic and Carolina coastal plain. Unlike the tall wild azaleas of the mountains, this species stays close to the ground, often no higher than the knee, and spreads by underground runners, or stolons, into broad, drifting colonies. The bluish, glaucous foliage is a hallmark, cool and sea-gray, and the species name atlanticum simply marks the plant's home along the Atlantic seaboard. The genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek; azalea comes from azaleos, meaning dry, a fitting root for a shrub of sandy, well-drained ground.
Rhododendron austrinum, the Florida azalea, is among the earliest and most powerfully fragrant of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Deep South. Native to the Florida Panhandle, southern Georgia, southern Alabama, and into Mississippi, the species haunts open pine woods, ravine slopes, and river bluffs, often growing in sandy, acidic ground beneath tall longleaf pines. The species name austrinum simply means southern, a fitting label for an azalea so at home in the Gulf Coast heat, and the genus name Rhododendron means rose tree in Greek.
Rhododendron austrinum 'Don's Variegated' is a rare variegated form of the native Florida azalea, carrying the wild flame azalea of the Gulf states but brushed with a fine tracing of gold along each leaf edge. The selection was discovered by Don Jacobs, the noted Georgia plantsman behind Eco-Gardens in Decatur, who found among seedlings of R. austrinum a plant whose foliage held light even before the flowers arrived. Variegation is uncommon in the native azaleas, which makes this a genuine collector's plant.
'Millie Mac' is a wild-selected native azalea from the damp hollows of Escambia County, Alabama, where Floyd McConnell found this plant as a distinctive limb sport on a wild shrub and propagated it for a beauty all its own. Related to the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, the selection shows white-margined flowers that hint at a touch of R. canescens in the background, and the lineage remains a matter of pleasant debate among native-azalea growers.
'Reagan' is a richly colored selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen in the wild in Florida near the Apalachicola River, the great blackwater river whose ravines shelter some of the Southeast's rarest plants. Where the typical Florida azalea runs to clear gold and orange, this form pairs yellow petals with deep reddish-pink buds and flower tubes, so that from a distance the whole shrub takes on a warm, red-flushed glow uncommon in the species.
