Salix tristis is a dwarf, gray-leaved native willow and one of the most surprising members of a genus most gardeners picture standing knee-deep in water. This small, tidy shrub was originally collected by Woodlanders in Jefferson County, Florida, where the plant grew in pine flatwoods on well-drained, even dry, sandy sites, the opposite of the streambank home most willows keep. The soft, grayish, woolly-hairy leaves and neat, low frame set the willow apart at a glance.
Rudbeckia missouriensis is the black-eyed Susan of the Ozark glades, a tough, long-lived native that covers itself in glowing orange-yellow daisies from the first heat of summer straight through to frost. Narrow, hairy, gray-green leaves and slender stems give the plant a finer, softer look than the coarse garden Susans, and the sheer length of bloom sets the species apart, flowering on through the drought and heat that shut down lesser perennials.
The one palm truly native to the American West. Washingtonia filifera, the California fan palm or desert fan palm, is the only palm native to the western United States, gathering in stately groves around desert springs and seeps across the Colorado, Mojave, and Sonoran deserts of California, Arizona, and northwestern Mexico. The genus honors George Washington, and the species name filifera, thread-bearing, names the curling white fibers that hang between the segments of each fan.
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.
Sabal mexicana, the Texas Palmetto, is a large, robust fan palm once known as Sabal texana. In the United States the palm is native to the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, and formerly ranged northward along the south Texas Gulf coast, while the wider distribution reaches through eastern Mexico into Central America. The species resembles the cabbage palmetto of the Southeast but reads as heavier and more massive, and the much larger seed is the surest way to tell the two apart.
Rudbeckia mohrii is a coneflower unlike any other, and the surprise is in the leaves. Where the rest of the clan spreads coarse, broad foliage, Mohr's coneflower sends up narrow, firm, grass-like blades, upright from the base, so that out of bloom the plant could be mistaken for a sedge or an iris. From this fountain of green rise slender, nearly leafless stems, two to four feet tall, each carrying three to ten bright yellow daisies with reddish-brown to dark purple centers from late spring well into fall.
Sabal rosei, the Llano Palm, is a handsome fan palm from the Pacific side of Mexico, ranging through the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco, where the palm covers the coastal plains, the llanos, by the hundred thousand. Thick, blue-green, leathery fan leaves give the plant a bold, sculptural quality, and the slim, straight trunk is either patterned with a neat spiral of old leaf bases or swept clean to reveal the ring-like scars beneath.
Rudbeckia triloba is the brown-eyed Susan, an airy, many-branched coneflower that throws up hundreds of small golden daisies, each with a neat dark brown to near-black eye, in a long blaze from late summer until hard frost. Where the familiar black-eyed Susans carry a few large flowers, this species scatters clouds of little ones over a bushy, three-lobed-leaved frame two to four feet tall, one of the most generous and long-blooming natives of the fall garden.
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.
Sabal minor, the Dwarf Palmetto, is the hardiest of the native fan palms and the one most gardeners can grow. The palm stays essentially stemless, holding a low fountain of stiff, blue-green, fan-shaped leaves straight from the ground, with the growing point set safely at or below the surface. Erect fruiting stalks rise well above the foliage and carry small black fruit about a quarter inch across.
Salix integra 'Hakuro Nishiki', the dappled willow, is an elegant small willow grown above all for the show its new growth makes in spring. As the shoots unfold, the glossy leaves emerge splashed and mottled in pink and creamy white, so freely that the whole plant reads as a soft cloud of blossom-pink from a distance, before the variegation settles to green and white through summer. The Japanese cultivar name, roughly white-dappled brocade, catches the effect exactly.
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.
The dwarf pink locust is a charming, little-known native shrub, a low, stoloniferous plant of one to two feet with compound, deciduous leaves and hanging clusters of pretty pink pea flowers in spring. Scattered through the sandy pinelands of the southeastern United States, the plant spreads quietly by underground runners into a low colony, since seed is virtually never set and the shrub increases almost entirely by vegetative means.
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.
'Flame Creeper' is a low, spreading evergreen azalea of the Satsuki group, the Japanese evergreen azaleas prized for late bloom and bright, clear color. Rather than rising into a shrub, this selection stays close to the ground, knitting into a dense, weed-smothering carpet of small, glossy, dark green leaves that hold through the year. The name catches both the habit and the color: a creeping mat that bursts into flame each spring.
