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.
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.
Miccosukee gooseberry is one of the rarest shrubs in the Southeast, a federally threatened native known from just two places on earth: a single site in McCormick County, South Carolina, and another in Jefferson County, Florida. The low, arching shrub, two to four feet tall, carries spiny branches and forms small thickets on shaded hardwood-forest hillsides, and small, long-petaled, creamy flowers hang from the branches in their season, followed by half-inch greenish fruits armored with soft, flexible spines.
'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.
Rougeplant is a small, soft-stemmed perennial of the pokeweed family, native to Florida, Texas, and the warm Americas, grown for the long show of tiny flowers and the shining strings of bright red berries that follow. Where common pokeweed is coarse and towering, rougeplant is refined and knee-high or less, with small leaves and delicate, arching sprays that carry flowers and ripe fruit at the same time for months on end.
Hardiness
Zones 8–9
Light
Part Shade
Height
6–18 in.
Spread
8–12 in.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, digestive health
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.
'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.
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.
'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.
