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.
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.
John Bartram collected Xanthorhiza simplicissima from the Carolina mountains sometime before 1776 and brought the plant back to his famous Philadelphia garden, which tells you two things: that yellowroot has been in cultivation for as long as this country has existed, and that people who know plants have always recognized something worth paying attention to here. The Cherokee had known the plant far longer, using the roots, sliced open to reveal a vivid, almost electric chrome yellow, as a dye, a bitter tonic, and a medicine for ailments from mouth sores to stomach complaints. The active compound is berberine, the same antimicrobial alkaloid found in goldenseal, and the roots produce berberine in striking quantity. Xanthorhiza is Greek for yellow root, and the name is no metaphor.
A native tree that bites back, and can numb a toothache. Zanthoxylum clava-herculis, the toothache tree or Hercules' club, is a small to medium deciduous tree of the citrus family, native along the coastal Southeast from Virginia to Florida and Texas. The genus name Zanthoxylum means yellow wood, and the species clava-herculis, the club of Hercules, names the stout, spiny, club-shaped trunk that is the tree's signature.
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.
