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.
Ironweed earns the name twice over. The stems are stiff enough to stand through a hurricane season without staking, and the seedheads that follow the flowers rust to the exact color of weathered iron. But the reason to grow Vernonia noveboracensis is the purple: not the tidy lavender of garden asters but a saturated, almost fluorescent violet that arrives in late July and holds into October, riding five to eight feet up on strong green stems above a mass of long, finely toothed leaves. Few native perennials carry a color this pure so late in the year.
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 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.
The red buckeye is the South's hummingbird herald, a clump-forming, round-topped deciduous shrub or small tree whose lustrous, palmately compound leaves break very early, often before the last frosts, and whose six-inch panicles of tubular scarlet-red flowers open in spring just as the ruby-throated hummingbirds return north. The bright bloom, unusual among the buckeyes, draws hummingbirds and bees in numbers and gives the plant a long place in the affection of native-plant gardeners across the southern United States.
A graceful native onion, Allium cernuum, the nodding onion, lifts loose clusters of pink to lavender, bell-shaped flowers that bend over in a soft arc at the top of slender stems, swaying through mid and late summer above tufts of grassy, blue-green foliage. The nodding habit gives the plant a particular charm, and the flowers draw native bees, butterflies, and other pollinators in good numbers.
Hardiness
Zones 4–8
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
12–18 in.
Spread
6–8 in.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, immune support
Seaside alder is a medium to large deciduous shrub, sometimes a small tree, with glossy, oval, toothed leaves and a habit of doing things backward. Where every other native alder flowers in spring, Alnus maritima opens elongated catkins in the fall, then carries small, woody, pinecone-like fruits through winter for quiet ornament.
Coastal serviceberry is the compact, low-growing member of a beloved native clan, a small deciduous shrub of the Atlantic coastal plain that spreads gently into colonies and opens clouds of white, five-petaled flowers in early spring, among the first shrubs to bloom as the woods wake.
Smooth false indigo is a rare deciduous shrub of sandy southern streambanks, carrying pinnate, compound leaves whose leaflets are notably large and rounded, a softer, more luxuriant texture than the ferny foliage of the common false indigos. In early summer the branch tips raise slender spikes of tiny blue to purple flowers, each lit with the bright orange anthers typical of the genus.
Ampelaster carolinianus is a woody, scrambling, semi-evergreen vine that climbs through shrubs and over stream banks along the coastal plain of the southeastern United States, opening lavender-blue flowers in November and December when every other aster has long since finished. The climbing aster keeps a private schedule, and that contrary timing is the whole charm.
Most bluestars are smooth, cool customers; Amsonia ludoviciana is the outlier of the group. The Louisiana bluestar belongs to the dogbane family, Apocynaceae, and shares the clan's five-petaled, star-shaped flowers and milky sap, but the leaves set the species apart: narrow and willowy, and unusually clothed beneath with a grey-white felt, a woolly tomentum that catches the light and lends the whole plant a soft, silvered cast rare in the genus. In spring, clustered flowers of a clean sky-blue open at the tips of the upright stems, quiet and steely and worked over by the first butterflies of the season.
Dwarf bluestar is the compact, well-behaved member of the clan, a tidy mound of upright stems and soft green leaves topped in late spring with clusters of powder-blue, star-shaped flowers. Often treated as a low form of the eastern bluestar, Amsonia montana stays small and shapely, a fine choice where the taller bluestars would sprawl.
Eastern bluestar is the bluestar most gardeners know, a robust native perennial with broader, willowy oval leaves and the clear blue, star-shaped flowers that name the genus, carried in clusters at the stem tips in spring. Amsonia tabernaemontana grows happily in deep, moist soil in part shade, and rewards almost any reasonable site with bloom and easy good health.
Few spring sights stir the woodland gardener like wild columbine in bloom. Aquilegia canadensis hangs nodding red-and-yellow bells, spurred and lantern-like, over lacy blue-green foliage, catching the low light of April along forest edges, rocky outcrops, and Appalachian coves where the plant has grown for ages. The eastern red columbine, or simply wild columbine, is among the most beloved of native spring wildflowers.
Aronia arbutifolia has grown in the wet woods and pocosins of the eastern United States for a very long time, largely unbothered by the horticultural world's attention. 'Brilliantissima' changed that. Selected for foliage with a deeper gloss and berries of a more saturated, almost lacquered red than the straight species, this is the form that finally made gardeners look twice at a native shrub long overlooked despite centuries of quiet usefulness.
Swamp milkweed brings beauty and biodiversity to the moist garden. Asclepias incarnata is a native perennial prized for domed clusters of rosy pink, vanilla-scented flowers and for a vital role in feeding pollinators, native to wet meadows, streambanks, and lowland prairies across much of North America. The plant takes happily to rain gardens, wet soils, and sunny borders alike, a natural for the ecologically minded gardener.
Butterfly weed is the orange star of the summer meadow, a strong-growing native perennial of eastern North America and a longtime favorite of gardeners. Flower color ranges from clear yellow to nearly red, but the typical Asclepias tuberosa blazes a vivid orange that butterflies, and the eye, find from across the garden.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
12–24 in.
Spread
12–18 in.
Bloom
Orange
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, pain relief, reproductive health
Smooth aster is one of the cleanest and most dependable of the fall natives, and 'Bluebird' is among the best forms. Aster laevis 'Bluebird' builds an upright, vase-shaped clump of smooth, blue-green foliage, then opens, in late summer and fall, sprays of violet-blue daisies centered in gold, a generous late feast for bees and butterflies as the season winds down.
Aromatic aster is the toughest and most fragrant of the fall asters, and 'Raydon's Favorite' is the classic selection. Aster oblongifolius 'Raydon's Favorite' forms a dense, rounded mound of small leaves that release a clean, balsam-like scent when brushed, and in early to mid fall vanishes under a haze of lavender-blue, gold-centered daisies.
