'Camilla's Blush' is a choice clone of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, selected and introduced by Jeff and Lisa Beasley of Transplant Nursery in Lavonia, Georgia, who named the plant for their eldest daughter. The shrub came to us as cuttings shared by our friend and fellow plant nut Dean Jolly. From the widespread wild species, this selection was chosen for an especially generous show of soft pink flowers and vigorous, willing growth.
Southern wax myrtle, long known as Myrica cerifera and now often placed in the genus Morella, is one of the most useful evergreens of the Southeast, a fast, aromatic large shrub or small tree of the coastal plain. 'Luray' is a male clone selected in Hampton County, South Carolina, by the plantsman Bob McCartney for a notably dense habit and a compact, semi-dwarf form. Brush the olive-green leaves and a clean, resinous, bay-like scent rises, the same fragrance that gives the tribe the old names wax myrtle and bayberry.
Salvia littae, Litta's purple sage, is a bold, late-flowering Mexican salvia from the cool cloud forests of Oaxaca, grown for thick, plush spikes of fuzzy, purplish-pink to magenta flowers that open when the gardening year is nearly done. On stout spikes a foot or more long, the densely felted blooms have a rich, tactile quality unusual even among salvias, and the color glows in the low light of late autumn.
Salvia darcyi, the Galeana sage, is a bold Mexican sage grown for one of the purest scarlets in the whole tribe of salvias, a color that reads across a garden and pulls hummingbirds from a distance. Through the heat of summer and well into fall, upright spikes of large, bright orange-red flowers rise above a mound of soft, gray-green, heart-shaped leaves that release a clean minty scent when brushed. Few tender salvias give so long or so vivid a show.
Salvia guaranitica 'Black and Blue' is a big, vigorous perennial sage grown for one of the truest blues in the garden, a deep gentian to cobalt held in near-black calyces that give the selection its name. Through the warm months, tall spikes rise above soft, hairy, deep green leaves and open in a long, generous run, and few hardy perennials offer a blue this saturated for so long a season.
Salvia puberula, the downy sage, is a big, late-flowering Mexican sage grown for tall spikes of deep magenta-pink flowers that open when the year is nearly done. The blooms are large, nearly four inches long, gathered in showy clusters atop the spikes, and the color is rich and saturated, glowing at a season when little else is in flower. The spikes cut well for the vase.
Salvia microphylla 'Lutea' is an uncommon yellow-flowered form of the littleleaf or baby sage, a small woody shrub of the mountains of Mexico and the borderlands. Where the species carries the usual salvia scarlet or orange-red, 'Lutea' opens soft, pale yellow flowers instead, a quiet and unusual color on a plant otherwise known for hot tones, and blooms over a long season from late spring into fall.
Salvia melissodora, the grape-scented sage, is a woody Mexican shrub grown for a scent as much as a flower, since the small lavender-blue blooms carry an unmistakable perfume of grape soda that drifts on warm air. Native to the Sierra Madre from Chihuahua south to Oaxaca, at four to eight thousand feet, the plant flowers in long spikes from late spring right through to frost, an exceptionally long and fragrant season.
Salvia greggii 'Furman's Red' is a small, woody sage grown for a long, generous run of deep, true-red flowers that carry from early summer straight through fall. The tubular, two-lipped blooms glow against fine, dark green, aromatic leaves, and few small shrubs bloom so steadily for so little trouble, feeding hummingbirds and bees the whole time.
The single white Lady Banks rose is the wild original, the mother of the whole clan, and to many noses the most fragrant rose in the garden. This is the species itself, Rosa banksiae in the true, single-flowered form, a vigorous, all but thornless evergreen climber from the hills and gorges of central China, capable of thirty or forty feet where a wall or a big tree will hold the weight. In spring the long, smooth green canes disappear under great hanging sprays of small single white flowers, each with a boss of gold stamens and a clean, sweet, violet-like scent that carries across a garden.
'Tuscan Blue' is the robust, broad-leaved aristocrat of the upright rosemaries, a fast, strongly vertical form grown as much for the deep blue flowers as for the kitchen. Thicker in leaf and richer in bloom than the common rosemary, the cultivar is the same Mediterranean herb, Rosmarinus officinalis, now moved by botanists into the genus Salvia as Salvia rosmarinus, though few cooks will trouble to relearn the name.
Salvia greggii 'Rachel' is an uncommon white-flowered form of the autumn sage, the normally red-flowered small shrub of the Texas and Mexican borderlands, and the plant came to Woodlanders from the Texas plantsman Greg Grant. The clean white flowers are a soft surprise in a species best known for scarlet, and 'Rachel' carries a second twist as well: the leaves are lightly variegated, speckled and dusted with cream, so the plant reads bright even out of bloom.
Sageretia minutiflora, the shellmound buckthorn, is a rare and little-known native shrub of the Southeastern coast, with scandent, half-climbing, somewhat spiny branches and small, glossy, faintly triangular leaves. The habit falls between shrub and vine, so the plant can be left to mound and tangle or trained up a fence or arbor, and the fine, dark, semi-evergreen foliage gives a handsome year-round texture in the mild coastal gardens where the species thrives.
'Gro-Low' is the ground-hugging form of the native fragrant sumac, a low, wide-spreading deciduous shrub that stays one to two feet tall while reaching six to eight feet across, knitting into a dense, weed-smothering carpet. The glossy trifoliate leaves are often mistaken at a glance for poison ivy or poison oak but are entirely harmless, and a crushed leaf gives off the clean, lemony scent that names the species.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Groundcover
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Rostrinucula dependens is a graceful oddity, a deciduous shrub from the hill country of central and southern China that looks, at a glance, like a butterfly bush that has learned to weep. The long, arching stems bow under their own weight, and in late summer they hang out slender, drooping catkins of bloom that give the plant the common name Weeping Buddleia, though the true kinship lies with the mints. Still rare in cultivation and only recently brought into Western gardens, the shrub remains a plant for the curious and the collector.
This is a remarkable early-blooming form of the sweet azalea, Rhododendron arborescens, the tall, hairless-twigged native prized for white summer flowers and an intense heliotrope perfume. Where the species is famous as one of the last azaleas to bloom, carrying fragrant white flowers with showy red stamens well into summer, this selection turns that timing on its head.
Michael Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, sets the bar plainly: one of the finest azaleas, the flowers opening just as the leaves expand, with no adequate way to do the plant justice in the written word. The royal azalea earns the praise. Rhododendron schlippenbachii is a deciduous azalea of Korea and the neighboring corners of northeast China, the Russian Far East, and Japan, where the shrub forms the dominant understory across whole hillsides, blooming in soft drifts of pink from four hundred to fifteen hundred meters up the slopes.
This showy little locust came to Woodlanders by a happy accident. Planted years ago alongside a row of black locusts, Robinia pseudoacacia, on a nearby farm, one tree surprised everyone by opening not the usual white but clusters of vivid rose-purple pea flowers over compound leaves, followed by small, rough, slightly bristly seed pods. The origin is uncertain: a North American species, likely, but possibly a seedling from seed received years ago from China.
Where the upright rosemaries reach for the sky, the Prostrate Rosemary lies down and flows, spilling in long, trailing, aromatic stems that pour over a wall, a bank, or the rim of a raised bed. The plant is the same species that flavors the Sunday roast, Rosmarinus officinalis, lately reclassified by botanists as Salvia rosmarinus, but grown here in a low, spreading form that trades the shrub's usual stiffness for a soft, cascading habit.
This hardy hybrid azalea is a piece of Woodlanders history, a deliberate cross made by the nursery's late founder, Robert Mackintosh. Mackintosh crossed the native roseshell azalea, Rhododendron prinophyllum, with the old hybrid group known as R. x kosterana, or mollis azalea, and the result is an upright, large-flowered deciduous shrub carrying bold orange trusses each marked with a splash of yellow.
