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.
'Varnadoe's Moonbeam' is a luminous early-spring selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, prized for a soft, glowing color less common in the species. Rather than the fiery orange of many forms, the flowers open in clear golden yellow brushed with apricot and orange in the throat, over reddish tubes, a warm but refined coloring that seems to catch and hold the light, moonlit rather than blazing, against the still-bare spring woodland.
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'.
Chapman's rhododendron is a compact evergreen shrub of six to eight feet, carrying small, thick, distinctly rounded leaves in a light green, with margins that roll under slightly at the edge. In late spring the plant opens clusters of rose-pink flowers, funnel-shaped and freely borne, and the effect on a well-grown specimen is generous rather than sparse. Set beside the closely related Rhododendron minus, this plant reads lighter and rounder in the leaf, and most authorities now treat the two as one species, filing this one as Rhododendron minus var. chapmanii. We keep the name under which gardeners and native-plant people know the plant.
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 swamp azalea, Rhododendron viscosum, ordinarily opens white; this selection breaks pink. 'Roseum' is a rose-flushed form of the familiar native, chosen and introduced by Woodlanders from a plant of Aiken County, South Carolina provenance, a home-ground selection that carries the sweet, clove-like fragrance of the species in a warmer color. The swamp azalea ranges widely across the eastern United States, from the Gulf Coast north into New England, threading the wet margins of swamps, bogs, and stream banks where few other flowering shrubs will follow.
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.
A spontaneous hybrid, probably including Rhododendron alabamense, R. canescens, and R. flammeum, and blooming in mid-spring. Woodlanders regularly offers several numbered selections in our "Pastel Series," which we introduced, and this is number four. A happy blend of colors that adds interest to any garden.
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
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
Rudbeckia nitida is a tall, luminous coneflower that trades the coarse hairiness of the common black-eyed Susans for smooth, glossy, dark green leaves and hairless stems, the shining foliage that gives the species a name. From a leafy base rise slender stems three to five feet tall, each carrying a large yellow daisy whose soft rays droop back from a raised, greenish-brown central cone, blooming through the heat of mid to late summer.
Ruellia caroliniensis, the Carolina wild petunia, is a modest, long-blooming native that carries far more ecological weight than the quiet flowers suggest. From early summer into fall, a steady succession of lavender to violet-purple trumpets, each an inch or two across and lasting only a single day, opens along upright stems a foot or two high, replaced faithfully the next morning so that the plant is seldom out of bloom for months on end.
Sabal 'Birmingham' is one of the hardiest fan palms an American gardener can grow, and the palm owes its survival to Woodlanders. Well-established specimens come through USDA Zone 7, deep into country where an ordinary cabbage palm needs coddling and near-perfect siting just to limp along. Broad, costapalmate, deep green fronds rise on a stout, slowly building trunk, giving the unmistakable palm silhouette hundreds of miles north of where the family usually stops.
Sabal etonia, the scrub palmetto, is a small fan palm found nowhere in the world but Florida, where the palm is a signature of the sand pine scrub, most abundantly along the ancient dunes of the Lake Wales Ridge. The specific epithet etonia comes from the Etonia scrub of Putnam County, the country where the species was first collected, so the botanical name carries a Florida place with it.
Sabal palmetto, the Cabbage Palmetto, is the classic palm of the Southeastern coast and the State Tree of both South Carolina and Florida. Blue-green, costapalmate (fan) leaves crown a straight trunk that thickens to about a foot and a half across, and the whole reads as the very image of the coastal South. The palm grows commonly to around thirty feet and climbs considerably taller in Florida.
Salix eriocephala, the heart-leaved or Missouri River willow, is a graceful native shrub, sometimes a modest multi-stemmed tree, of riverbanks and wet meadows across northern and eastern North America. The plant rises on several trunks clad in coarse gray bark, reaching roughly eight to a dozen feet in the garden and more in wild thickets, and the epithet eriocephala, meaning woolly-headed, points to the soft, silky catkins that give the willow much of its charm.
