Rudbeckia grandiflora is the tall, wild aristocrat of the coneflowers, sending stiff stems three to six feet high above a clump of coarse, sandpapery leaves to carry large golden daisies through the heat of high summer. The ray flowers droop back from a prominent, dark chocolate-brown central dome in the loose, unbuttoned way of the prairie species, giving the flower a windblown grace that the stiff garden hybrids have long since bred out.
'Dawn at the River' is a fine selection of the native flame azalea, Rhododendron calendulaceum, one of the most spectacular of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the eastern mountains. The species blankets woodland slopes and high mountain balds through the southern Appalachians, from Pennsylvania to Georgia, where the famous flame-colored display draws pilgrims to places like Gregory Bald each June. The species name calendulaceum means resembling Calendula, the marigold, a nod to the vivid orange of the flowers, while the common name flame azalea catches both that fire and the way the upright buds stand like candle flames.
Rudbeckia maxima is the giant of the coneflowers, and grows nothing at all like a black-eyed Susan. From a bold basal rosette of huge, smooth, paddle-shaped leaves the color of blue-gray wax rise bare flower stems five to seven feet tall, each topped by a golden daisy whose drooping rays hang like a skirt beneath a strikingly tall, dark central cone. The effect, foliage and flower together, is pure architecture.
Littleleaf sumac is a big, bushy deciduous shrub of west Texas, the Southwest, and adjoining Mexico, built for heat, sun, and drought. The compound leaves are made up of tiny leaflets that give a fine, almost feathery texture, and they turn rose to purple in fall, an unusual and lovely tone among the sumacs. Tough and dryland-hardy, the plant is well worth trying in the South and any hot, well-drained garden.
Rudbeckia nitida is a tall, luminous coneflower that trades the coarse hairiness of the common black-eyed Susans for smooth, glossy, dark green leaves and hairless stems, the shining foliage that gives the species a name. From a leafy base rise slender stems three to five feet tall, each carrying a large yellow daisy whose soft rays droop back from a raised, greenish-brown central cone, blooming through the heat of mid to late summer.
'Woodlanders Evangeline' is our own selection of the southern, evergreen sweetbay magnolia, Magnolia virginiana var. australis, chosen for the qualities that make a sweetbay worth growing: glossy evergreen foliage, a shapely habit, and the clean, lemon-sweet fragrance for which the species is loved. Sweetbay is native across the moist ground of the eastern United States, and in the South grows into a graceful evergreen tree rather than the shrubby, deciduous plant of the North.
Rhus javanica, better known today as Rhus chinensis, is the Chinese sumac or nutgall tree, a fast, adaptable deciduous large shrub or small tree of East and Southeast Asia, in time reaching fifteen to twenty-five feet. The pinnate leaves, carried on downy shoots and set along a distinctively winged leaf stalk, turn vivid yellow to red in autumn, and creamy panicles of small flowers open in late summer, feeding bees when much of the garden has finished.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
12–20 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
The swamp azalea, Rhododendron viscosum, ordinarily opens white; this selection breaks pink. 'Roseum' is a rose-flushed form of the familiar native, chosen and introduced by Woodlanders from a plant of Aiken County, South Carolina provenance, a home-ground selection that carries the sweet, clove-like fragrance of the species in a warmer color. The swamp azalea ranges widely across the eastern United States, from the Gulf Coast north into New England, threading the wet margins of swamps, bogs, and stream banks where few other flowering shrubs will follow.
Magnolia 'Spectrum' is one of the great red-purple magnolias, a large deciduous tree that covers itself in spring with huge, tulip-shaped flowers of deep reddish-purple. Each bloom can span ten to twelve inches, richly colored outside and paler pinkish-white within, opening from fat, purple-pink buds in mid to late spring, later than the frost-prone saucer magnolias and all the safer for it.
'Arp' is the rosemary to grow where ordinary rosemary freezes out, the cold-hardiest of the common culinary rosemaries and a genuine boon to gardeners north of the herb's usual range. Selected in 1972 from a plant growing at Arp, in east Texas, by the noted herb grower Madalene Hill, this selection carries the same needle-like evergreen foliage, aromatic and useful in the kitchen, on a robust, bushy, upright frame, with the bonus of a distinct lemon note in the scent and a soft gray-green cast to the leaves.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–4 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, mental & emotional well-being, general wellness, topical applications
Among the upright rosemaries, 'Miss Jessopp's Upright' stands as the tall, columnar backbone of the herb garden, sending stiff, aromatic branches skyward in a narrow plume rather than the low sprawl of the creeping kinds. The cultivar carries the name of Euphemia Jessopp, an Edwardian gardener whose plant the great plantsman E. A. Bowles selected and passed into wider cultivation, and the shrub has been grown under her name for more than a century. Botanists have lately moved rosemary out of the old genus and into Salvia, so that the plant now answers to Salvia rosmarinus as often as to the familiar Rosmarinus officinalis, though gardeners and cooks are in no hurry to give up the older word.
Abutilon megapotamicum is the trailing one of the flowering maples, a slender, half-vining deciduous shrub that drapes and clambers rather than standing stiffly upright. Its species name means "of the big river," for the Rio Grande basin of southern Brazil where it grows wild, and like the rest of its tribe it belongs not to the maples its leaves suggest but to the mallow family, in company with hibiscus and hollyhock.
'Florence' is a robust selection, possibly a hybrid, of the native Oconee azalea, Rhododendron flammeum, chosen and named by our friend Charles Webb of Superior Trees in Florida. The name honors Florence, Mr. Webb's wife, and both have long been good friends of ours. The plant traces back further still, to a group of azaleas that came originally from the late Aaron Varnadoe of Colquitt, Georgia, who collected, propagated, and shared so many fine native azaleas across the South.
Michaux's sumac is a low, colony-forming native shrub, rhizomatous and densely hairy, rising only one to three feet on erect stems from a spreading root system. The compound leaves turn beautiful shades of orange and red in fall, and the dwarf, running habit makes the plant a fine, well-behaved groundcover-scale sumac for a sunny to lightly shaded native planting.
Abeliophyllum is a genus of exactly one species, a quiet distinction it has held since botanists first described it from Korea in 1919. It belongs to the olive family alongside lilac and true forsythia, and in the wild it survives at only a handful of sites in the Korean hills, where it is now protected by law as an endangered plant. By the 1930s it had reached gardens in Europe and North America and earned an Award of Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society, and collectors have cherished it ever since. 'Roseum' is the blush-pink form of that rarity.
The pineapple lily, Eucomis comosa, is a summer-flowering bulb from the grasslands and damp meadows of eastern South Africa, grown the world over for one of the most whimsical flower spikes in the plant kingdom. From a large bulb rise broad, strap-shaped leaves, and out of their center in mid to late summer climbs a stout stalk two to three feet tall, densely packed with dozens of small, starry, greenish-white flowers and crowned at the very top with a tuft of leafy green bracts, the whole thing a dead ringer for a pineapple.
Among the sweetbay magnolias there is a curious dwarf that most references overlook, though at Woodlanders we feel the plant deserves proper recognition. This form, Magnolia virginiana var. pumila, grows wild on the frequently burned pinelands of the southern Coastal Plain, and looks to be an adaptation to that fiery world: the plant stays small, begins flowering while very young and low, and spreads slowly by underground runners into a modest colony.
A red or scarlet flowered buckeye of the Gulf Coast, Aesculus splendens stands close to the red buckeye, Aesculus pavia, and may be no more than a striking form of that species. Dirr, in his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, notes that Rehder listed this buckeye as a distinct species and that several horticulturists feel strongly about the authenticity, the chief differences being scarlet flowers and leaves felted on the undersides. Native to Louisiana and perhaps other Gulf Coast states, the scarlet buckeye is grown much as the red buckeye is.
A low, often half-prostrate form of the red buckeye, Aesculus pavia var. humilis keeps to a small, spreading shrub where the typical red buckeye grows into a small tree. The scarlet spring flowers come in smaller panicles, and in every other respect the plant follows the species: lustrous palmate leaves that break early, a love of moist, well-drained woodland soil, and the same magnetism for returning hummingbirds.
Summersweet has long been a shrub gardeners plant by the nose. Native to the moist woods and pond margins of the eastern United States, Clethra alnifolia earned the old country names Sweet Pepperbush and Summersweet for the honey-and-clove perfume that pours off the white summer spikes, a scent that carries clear across a garden on a warm afternoon. Colonists found a further use for the plant: the flowers, crushed in water, raise a soft lather, and were once pressed into service as a field soap.
