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.
The overcup oak is named for a small piece of botanical theater: an acorn so nearly swallowed by its cup that only the tip shows, sealed up as if against the floodwaters the tree was born to. Quercus lyrata is a creature of the southern bottomlands, the broad floodplains and backswamps from the Mississippi Delta to the Carolina river bottoms, standing through the cycles of flood and drawdown that drown lesser trees.
Quercus michauxii is a big, generous bottomland oak that borrows the best of two better-known relatives: the pale, flaky, handsome bark of the white oak, and the large, coarsely toothed, chestnut-shaped leaves of the chestnut oak. The result is one of the noblest of the Southern hardwoods. In Coker and Totten's Trees of the Southeastern States, a 1931 letter from James Henry Rice, Jr. of Colleton County, South Carolina, put it plainly: "It is a noble and beautiful tree and might be termed majestic with no violence to the language."
The first surprise of Quercus phellos is that nobody believes they're an oak. The leaves are narrow and untoothed, willow-like, finer than an oak has any right to be, and they turn soft yellow before they fall; only the acorns, small and round and produced by the thousand, give the game away.
There is a small drama in this oak's name. It honors Benjamin Franklin Shumard, a physician turned geologist who became the first State Geologist of Texas and who, decades before the oil boom, noted petroleum seeping up at several spots across the state. The man who named the tree for him in 1860 was his own assistant, Samuel Buckley, who would later turn on Shumard in print, call him incompetent, and take the state geologist's post for himself, all of which makes the enduring courtesy of the name faintly delicious. The tree has outlasted the quarrel.
Quercus stellata, the post oak, is one of the great toughs of the eastern white oaks, a tree born to dry uplands, old fields, and rocky ridges from the sandy hills of the Carolinas and Georgia across the Piedmont and into the prairies of Texas and the Midwest. Where soils are thin and the summers unrelenting, post oak has made a living, holding ground against wind, sun, and time itself.
Smooth sumac is a bold, colony-forming native shrub of the eastern and central United States, in time reaching the scale of a small tree, and one of the finest plants going for a hot, dry, sunny site where little else will thrive. The long, pinnately compound leaves give an almost tropical texture through summer, and the plant spreads by root suckers into broad, picturesque colonies, or can be held to a single tree-like specimen where the suckers are controlled.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun
Height
9–15 ft.
Spread
10–15 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, topical applications, general wellness
Staghorn sumac is a bold native shrub or small tree of the northeastern United States and Canada, growing fifteen to thirty feet on stout, forking stems clothed in fine velvety hairs, the texture and antler-like branching that give the plant the name. The big, pinnate leaves are bright green through summer and turn a spectacular blend of yellow, orange, and red in fall, one of the great autumn shrubs of the eastern flora.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–30 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, 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 fulgida var. fulgida is the true orange coneflower, the wild species that stands behind the famous 'Goldsturm', quieter, finer, and later to bloom than that celebrated garden child. From a low clump of dark, roughly hairy leaves rise branching stems two to three feet tall, each ending in a small golden daisy about two inches across, the deep yellow rays set around a low dome of brown-black. Where many of the black-eyed Susans have blazed and faded by August, the orange coneflower is only getting started, carrying many small flowers from late summer well into October.
Important: This plant is sold within South Carolina only.In the high-gradient streams of the southern Appalachians, the Gauley, the Bluestone, the Greenbrier, scattered tributaries of the New River, and a handful of similar second- and third-order rivers, grows a shrub that holds on to rocky bars and scoured banks where almost nothing else can. This is Spiraea virginiana, the Appalachian spiraea, a plant that evolved alongside the violent flood regime of these mountain rivers and depends on that disturbance. The floods scour competing vegetation off the banks, expose mineral soil for germination, and break off rhizome fragments that float downstream to colonize new sites. Where the rivers were dammed, the floods stopped, and the spiraea began to disappear.
Stokesia laevis is one of those rare native perennials that marries toughness with elegance, a plant that has stood its ground in the Southeastern pinelands for ages yet looks as though it belongs in the most refined cottage border. Native to the sandy, open woods and pine savannas of the Carolinas, Georgia, and the Gulf coastal plain, this Stokes' aster rises each spring from tidy, semi-evergreen rosettes of glossy leaves before sending up broad, fringed flowers in shades of sky blue, lavender, or soft cream.
Symphyotrichum oblongifolium, the aromatic aster, saves the best of the season for last. Long after most perennials have folded, this tough native throws up a low, spreading mound of stiff, well-branched stems and buries the whole clump under small violet-blue daisies, each lit with a bright gold eye, from early fall well into November. The show arrives just as the garden goes quiet, and the flowers hum with the last bees and butterflies of the year.
Bald cypress is the great deciduous conifer of the southern swamp, a long-lived, stately tree of river margins, bottomlands, and blackwater sloughs across the southern United States, and one of the most beautiful native trees the region has to offer. Soft, feathery, two-ranked needles clothe the branches in a light, bright green through summer, then turn a warm russet-orange and fall, leaving a broad, pyramidal frame bare for winter.
The southern shield fern carries a longer pedigree than most ferns in cultivation. The type specimen was collected by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland near Cumanacoa, in the cloud-shrouded country around Caripe in northeastern Venezuela, during their five-year expedition through the equinoctial Americas. Decades later the German botanist Carl Sigismund Kunth, Humboldt's assistant in Paris and the man who would spend years describing the ten thousand and more specimens the explorers shipped home, became the namesake when Nicaise Auguste Desvaux formally described the species in 1827 as Nephrodium kunthii. C.V. Morton moved the fern into Thelypteris in 1967, and recent molecular work (Fawcett and Smith, 2021) has shifted the name again into Pelazoneuron, though the older binomial remains the one in common horticultural use.
Acer barbatum is a medium to large deciduous tree of rounded, oval form, a southern cousin of the northern sugar maple and sometimes filed under Acer saccharum subsp. floridanum or Acer floridanum. The Florida maple is built for heat in a way the northern relative is not, smaller in every part, with leaves that are whitish beneath and a constitution suited to long, humid summers. In the wild these trees favor fertile, moist, well-drained, often calcareous ground, frequently along streams and in rich hammocks from Virginia south to the Florida panhandle and west into Texas.
Acer rubrum 'Candy Ice' is a Woodlanders introduction, found in southwest Virginia by the late Norman Beal. We use Norman's original name, though the same tree has been circulated elsewhere as 'Snowfire'. This is an unusual variegated red maple, the leaves marbled in pink, white, and green, and the foliage burns early, among the first to color when fall arrives.
In the cool hush of shaded woods, Adiantum pedatum rises on slender, glossy black stems that hold the lacy green fronds in flattened semicircles, each a hand-turned fan or horseshoe of finely cut segments. Standing twelve to thirty inches tall, the northern maidenhair forms serene clumps that spread slowly on creeping rhizomes, never in a hurry. In early spring the fiddleheads emerge a rosy to burgundy hue and uncurl into the distinctive bird's-foot, palmately branched leaves that give the fern such grace.
In July, when most of the shade garden has settled into a holding pattern of foliage and waiting, Aesculus parviflora opens for business. The timing is the first surprise. The flowers are the second. Each panicle is a foot or more of tightly packed white tubular blooms with conspicuous pink-red anthers projecting beyond the petals, the whole spike held upright above the foliage like something assembled by a botanical committee that could not decide between elegant and extravagant and chose both. A mature colony in full bloom in midsummer is among the more spectacular events available to the shade gardener, and the hummingbirds and swallowtails arrive reliably.
A wide-spreading, suckering, multi-stemmed deciduous shrub of slow, deliberate growth, Aesculus parviflora var. serotina carries the same upright white bottlebrush flowers as the bottlebrush buckeye, but opens them two to three weeks later, well into the heat of summer. The overall shape is irregular and almost stratified, the branches layering horizontally, and the medium to dark green leaves turn a clear yellow in fall.
