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 southern maidenhair has a way of choosing impossible places. Look for this fern on a shaded limestone bluff where water seeps through the rock, or in the spray zone of a spring-fed creek, and you will likely find the fronds growing sideways out of a crevice as if that were the most natural thing in the world. The wiry black stems hold up fan-shaped pinnules so thin they seem almost translucent in morning light, and the whole plant trembles at the slightest breath of air. Few native ferns carry this much delicacy with so little fuss.
Amorpha fruticosa, the false indigo bush, is the largest and most widespread of the native false indigos, a fast, open, deciduous shrub that carries long spires of tiny deep blue-purple flowers, each lit with a single vivid orange anther, at the branch tips in late spring and early summer. From a suckering base rise arching stems six to twelve feet tall, clothed in soft, ferny, pinnate leaves that give off a clean, resinous scent when crushed. In full bloom the whole shrub seems to smoke with color, and the flower spikes hum with bees.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–12 ft.
Spread
6–12 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, general wellness, pain relief, topical applications
The pawpaw is a small, tropical-looking deciduous tree with large, drooping leaves and the largest edible fruit native to this country. In mid to late summer the green, mango-shaped fruit softens to a fragrant custard, banana and mango in one, around rows of big dark seeds, relished by people and raccoons alike. The crushed leaves carry a distinctive odor, and the whole tree reads more like the tropics than a temperate woodland.
A rare, semi-evergreen shrub, Baccharis dioica resembles the common groundsel bush, Baccharis halimifolia, but is quite distinct. In 1979, just before Hurricane Frederic did tremendous damage to the Mobile, Alabama area, we found this plant growing behind the dunes on Dauphin Island.
Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
Canna flaccida is the wild golden canna of the Southern coastal plain, a native perennial with the broad, light green, tropical-looking leaves of the genus and large soft yellow flowers held above them in summer. Where the heavy garden cannas read as bedding, this species keeps a looser, wilder grace, the petals thin and almost orchid-like, opening in the morning and lasting a day.
Carex flaccosperma, the blue wood sedge, is a clump-forming native of the Southeastern woodlands grown for cool, glaucous, blue to blue-green foliage. The blades are wide for a sedge, to half an inch, faintly quilted along the veins, and they catch the light with a soft powdery sheen that lifts a shaded planting where most greens recede.
Among ornamental grasses, Chasmanthium latifolium is the rare one that thrives in shade. River oats, also called northern sea oats and inland sea oats, is a clumping, rhizomatous perennial grass of the eastern and central United States, found in the wild along wooded creek banks, river bottoms, and shaded slopes from Pennsylvania south to Florida and west toward the prairies. The broad, bamboo-like blades are wider than most grasses can claim, and the plant carries them in a loose, arching mound that takes deep shade without sulking.
The turtlehead is named twice over for things that go quiet. The genus Chelone is the Greek word for tortoise, after a nymph who mocked the marriage of Zeus and Hera and was turned, for her insolence, into a creature that carries her house and holds her tongue; one look at the flower, a hinged, swollen, pink-and-gaping thing that seems about to either speak or bite, and you see why the name stuck. The species honors John Lyon, the Scottish plant hunter who worked the southern Appalachians in the footsteps of Bartram and Michaux. Lyon collected this turtlehead somewhere in the mountains around 1812 without recording quite where, noting only in his catalog that here was a new species, and a beautiful one; his friend Frederick Pursh later pinned Lyon's name to the plant. Lyon did not have long to enjoy the honor, dying in 1814 in the same southern mountains that had made his name. The plant has fared better. Chelone lyonii grows wild along streambanks and seeps in the high southern Appalachians, and 'Hot Lips' is the selection that turned the color up, deeper rose-pink flowers over foliage that emerges with a bronze cast. The flowers arrive in late summer and run into fall, which is the real gift, holding color in the moist and shaded corners just as the rest of the garden tires. Only a bumblebee is strong enough to force the blooms open, so a planting in flower comes with a low percussion of bees muscling in and backing out. Give them wet feet and a little shade and there is very little that does a damp, difficult spot this gracefully, or this late.
Clethra alnifolia, the summersweet or sweet pepperbush, is a deciduous native of the eastern United States, at home along pond edges, in damp woods, and at the margins of coastal swamps from Maine to Florida. The species spreads gently by suckers into colonies of upright stems, and earns the name sweet pepperbush from the small, peppercorn-like seed capsules that follow the flowers and hang on through winter. For all that, the summer flowers are the reason to grow them: erect bottlebrush spikes, intensely honey-scented, that open over many weeks in the heat of July and August when little else in the shrub border is in bloom.
Clinopodium georgianum is a low, aromatic shrublet of the mint family, prized for highly scented foliage and clouds of pinkish-lavender flowers in late summer and fall, when much of the garden is winding down. Georgia savory makes a fine edging or front-of-border plant for sunny or lightly shaded spots with good drainage, and unlike most of the tribe, this southern native will grow in heavier soils as well as sand.
Conradina canescens 'Gray Mound' is a silver-leaved selection of the false rosemary that grows wild on the deep, pine-fringed sands of the northern Gulf Coast, in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle, where the species once mingled with sea oats and longleaf pine. A member of the mint family, this aromatic shrub carries soft, needle-like foliage in a ghostly silver-gray, and from spring into early summer, sometimes again in the cool of fall, offers a flush of pale lavender to bluish, two-lipped flowers that native bees and butterflies work eagerly.
This is a tree you harvest from a boat. Crataegus opaca, the western mayhaw, grows wild in the flooded bottoms of the Gulf Coastal Plain, the cypress sloughs and pond margins of east Texas, Louisiana, and the Deep South, and when their fruit ripens in late spring it drops straight into the water and floats. For generations Southern families went out in May with boats, nets, and scoops to gather the bobbing red haws off the surface, a fast three weeks of work that turned into a year's worth of jelly. The name says as much: mayhaw, for the month, and haw, the old word for hawthorn.
Dryopteris ludoviciana, the southern shield fern, is a bold, glossy evergreen native to the wet woodlands of the American South. The species epithet ludoviciana means "of Louisiana," a nod to the swampy bottomlands, blackwater hammocks, and shaded seeps where the fern grows wild, from Florida west to Texas and north through the Carolinas.
Dryopteris ×australis is a fern that cannot, strictly speaking, reproduce, and is all the more vigorous for the lack. This is a natural hybrid, thrown wherever two Southern wood ferns grow within a spore’s reach of one another: the log fern, Dryopteris celsa, and the southern wood fern, Dryopteris ludoviciana. The cross comes out sterile, setting spores that never amount to anything, so the fern cannot seed itself across a bed the way a large fern usually will. Every plant in cultivation traces back by division to a wild clump found somewhere between Virginia and Louisiana, the greatest number of them in Alabama.
This very rare aster, now placed in the genus Eurybia, is a true Florida endemic, native only to the moist pine flatwoods of the lower Apalachicola River. The plant is a botanical oddity: the clumping, foot-tall foliage is narrow, stiff, and grass-like, so unlike the leafy stems of an ordinary aster that a passerby might take the clump for a tuft of sedge. From late spring into early summer, slender flower stems rise above the leaves carrying clusters of inch-wide lavender-purple daisies, each ringing a small yellow eye.
Hamamelis virginiana does everything backwards, and that is the entire appeal. When the rest of the woods has shut down for the year, when the leaves are gone and nothing else is in flower, witch hazel chooses that exact moment to bloom: spidery yellow flowers, all thin crimped strap-like petals, scattered along the bare branches through late fall and into the cold. They carry a faint sweet scent on a mild day and they wait, patiently, for whatever gnat or late fly is still working, because almost nothing else is. This is the shrub that flowers when flowering makes no sense, and is all the more loved for the defiance.
Hypericum nudiflorum is the early riser among the St. John's Worts, a slender, upright shrub that opens golden flowers as early as May, often a full month ahead of relatives. The blooms carry the many-stamened brush typical of the clan, set against broad, light green, oval leaves that give the plant a softer, leafier look than the needle-leaved species.
Ilex glabra 'Leucocarpa' is the white-berried surprise among the inkberries, a native evergreen holly that trades the usual near-black fruit for berries of clean ivory white. On the ordinary inkberry the dark berries all but vanish against the deep green leaves, but here the pale fruit stands out cleanly and holds on the branches from fall right through to spring, a quiet, unexpected show in the winter garden.
Ilex verticillata 'Red Sprite' is winterberry shrunk to garden size and cranked up in intensity. Where much of the landscape fades to gray, this compact native holly turns into a beacon, the bare stems packed with heavy clusters of large, glossy scarlet berries that color in fall and cling deep into winter, a living ember at the pond's edge or against fresh snow.
