Woody Plants

The garden's backbone: flowering trees, native and rare shrubs, and evergreens that hold their shape through every season. Many are Southeastern natives; others are quiet collector's plants you won't find at a big-box nursery, chosen for resilience and lasting, year-round interest.

554 plants in this collection

1979 Catalogue View

About the Woody Plants Collection

Woody plants are the bones a garden is built on. Trees, shrubs, and woody-stemmed vines: these are the plants that give a place height, shade, structure, and permanence, holding their shape through winter when the perennials have gone underground. Woodlanders has always leaned woody, and this is the broadest of our collections, the trunk from which the more specific groups branch.

The range is deliberately wide. Flowering trees and understory shrubs, evergreen screens and deciduous specimens, Southeastern natives beside quiet collector's plants from Asia and the Americas. Some are grown for a single extraordinary week of bloom; others hold the eye with bark, berry, or a canopy that deepens for decades. Much of what you will find here is uncommon, chosen for character rather than for the shelves of a big-box lot.

Because the collection is large, let the more focused groups guide you. Reach for our Canopy Trees for shade and scale, Large Shrubs and Small & Medium Shrubs for structure at eye level, and Conifers for evergreen form. Many woody plants here are also Southeastern Natives, at home in local soil and weather.

Woody plants are a long game, and the most rewarding kind. Site each one for the space it will fill at maturity, not the size in the pot, give the roots a good first year, and the tree or shrub will outgrow, outlast, and outgive almost anything else you plant. Read each listing for mature height, spread, and hardiness before you dig.