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.
'Millie Mac' is a wild-selected native azalea from the damp hollows of Escambia County, Alabama, where Floyd McConnell found this plant as a distinctive limb sport on a wild shrub and propagated it for a beauty all its own. Related to the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, the selection shows white-margined flowers that hint at a touch of R. canescens in the background, and the lineage remains a matter of pleasant debate among native-azalea growers.
'Reagan' is a richly colored selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, chosen in the wild in Florida near the Apalachicola River, the great blackwater river whose ravines shelter some of the Southeast's rarest plants. Where the typical Florida azalea runs to clear gold and orange, this form pairs yellow petals with deep reddish-pink buds and flower tubes, so that from a distance the whole shrub takes on a warm, red-flushed glow uncommon in the species.
'Varnadoe's Moonbeam' is a luminous early-spring selection of the Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, prized for a soft, glowing color less common in the species. Rather than the fiery orange of many forms, the flowers open in clear golden yellow brushed with apricot and orange in the throat, over reddish tubes, a warm but refined coloring that seems to catch and hold the light, moonlit rather than blazing, against the still-bare spring woodland.
'Admiral Semmes' is the best known and easiest to grow of the Dodd nurseries' Confederate Series of azaleas, a deciduous hybrid built for the Deep South's heat and humidity. The cross joins the native Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, with the large-flowered Exbury hybrid 'Hotspur Yellow', and was raised at Dodd and Dodd Nurseries in Semmes, Alabama. The plant takes its name from the Confederate admiral Raphael Semmes, and went on to win the Georgia Gold Medal in 2007.
'Colonel Mosby' is among the most arresting of the Dodd nurseries' Confederate Series of native azaleas, a deciduous hybrid raised at Dodd and Dodd Nurseries in Semmes, Alabama. The cross, made by Bob Schwindt, joins the golden Florida azalea, Rhododendron austrinum, with the large-flowered Exbury hybrid 'Hotspur Yellow', and the plant takes its name from John Singleton Mosby, the Confederate cavalry commander known as the Gray Ghost.
Rhododendron canescens, the Piedmont azalea, is very likely the most widespread of all the wild deciduous azaleas of the Southeast, ranging through the Piedmont, coastal plain, and stream edges from the mid-Atlantic to the Gulf. Country people have long called the plant the Southern pinxter or simply wild honeysuckle, for the sweet, honeysuckle-like scent of the flowers. The species name canescens means becoming gray or hoary, a reference to the soft gray down that coats the undersides of the leaves and the new growth.
'Clyo Red' is a striking red-flowered selection of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, a species usually seen in soft pink and white. Here the wild pink is deepened to a rich cherry-red, an uncommon and eye-catching tone among the native azaleas, carried on the same fragrant, early-spring frame that makes the Piedmont azalea so beloved. The name points to Clyo, a small community in Effingham County, Georgia, near the plant's Southern home.
'Varnadoe's Pink' is a choice dark-pink selection of the native Piedmont azalea, Rhododendron canescens, chosen and grown by the late Aaron Varnadoe of Colquitt, Georgia, a great native-azalea grower and genuine Southern character. Where the wild species varies from pale to deep pink, this selection holds a rich, abundant dark pink, and the plant has become a popular favorite for that reliable color and a good habit and foliage. The selection is sometimes sold under the name 'Varnadoe's Phlox Pink'.
Rhododendron colemanii, the Red Hills azalea, is one of the most recently recognized of all the native deciduous azaleas, first described as a distinct species only in 2008. For years the plant was folded in with the Alabama azalea, Rhododendron alabamense, which blooms earlier and holds consistently white, yellow-blotched flowers; the Red Hills azalea, by contrast, flowers later and in a wider range of color. The species takes its home ground from the Red Hills country of the inner coastal plain, a narrow range across southwest Georgia and southern Alabama.
Pinxterbloom is the wild azalea of the eastern woods, a hardy native that hangs its soft pink flowers along the branches in mid-spring, just before the leaves catch up. The funnel-shaped blooms, pale pink to nearly white, throw long curving stamens well past the petals, giving the whole shrub a hazy, spidery lightness, and carry a faint sweet scent on a warm day. Few native shrubs say spring so plainly.
Among the most beloved of the eastern wild azaleas, Rhododendron periclymenoides drifts through the open woods and swamp margins of the eastern United States from New Hampshire and Massachusetts south to South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama, opening clouds of pink bloom just as the woodland wakes in spring. This selection breaks from the ordinary pink of the species: a soft lavender-purple color form discovered in Lancaster County, South Carolina, and introduced by Woodlanders, uncommon in the wild and rarer still in cultivation. Botanists once filed the species under the name Rhododendron nudiflorum, and the plant still answers to that older label in many an old garden book.
The native deciduous azaleas of the southeastern United States bloom in a long relay, from the pinxters and Piedmont azaleas of March through the flame azaleas of April and May and on into July with the red of Rhododendron prunifolium. And then, once most gardeners have closed the azalea chapter for the year, Rhododendron serrulatum opens. Hammocksweet azalea is the last of the line, flowering in August and September and sometimes later still.
The glaucous swamp azalea is a native deciduous shrub of the wetland South and the eastern seaboard, a blue-leaved form of Rhododendron viscosum, the widespread swamp azalea that ranges from the Gulf Coast north into New England. The variety glaucum sets the plant apart with foliage washed in a soft blue-green, most striking on the leaf undersides, which flash pale as a breeze turns them. Where many shrubs falter, this azalea thrives in the consistently moist, even boggy ground of swamps, marshes, and stream banks.
'Addison' began as a chance seedling of the Alabama azalea, Rhododendron alabamense, and grew into something none of the parents quite predicted. Surely a hybrid, though the exact parentage remains unknown, the plant carries large, dense, dome-shaped terminal clusters that blend shades of yellow, pink, and white in a single truss, a multicolored effect striking enough that the selection first went by the name 'Stunning'. Charles Webb, a good friend of Woodlanders, spotted and selected the seedling in Florida, and the plant now carries the name of one of his young granddaughters.
'Casille' arose spontaneously, a chance hybrid among three of the southeastern native azaleas: the white, lemon-scented Alabama azalea, Rhododendron alabamense; the fragrant pink Piedmont azalea, R. canescens; and the fiery, unscented Oconee azalea, R. flammeum. From that three-way mingling came a deciduous shrub that blooms in mid-spring in a lively pastel blend, the flowers shifting through pink, white, and soft yellow with a subtle sweetness inherited from the fragrant parents. An exclusive Woodlanders introduction, the plant was named by George Mitchell for his wife.
The lesser-known of the two Hong Kong roses in the Woodlanders collection, Rhodoleia henryi is a handsome evergreen shrub or small tree from southern China and Taiwan, still little grown in the United States and, like much of the genus, occasionally muddled in the naming. Set beside the sister species Rhodoleia championii, this plant carries narrower, more pointed leaves, and the species is reckoned the more cold hardy of the two, a useful distinction for gardeners testing the edge of the range.
Fragrant sumac is a versatile deciduous shrub native across much of the eastern and central United States, where the plant threads scattered woodlands, rocky slopes, and open banks. The trifoliate leaves, often mistaken at a glance for poison oak, are entirely harmless, and a crushed leaf releases the clean, lemony-resinous scent that gives the plant every one of the common names, from fragrant sumac to skunkbush, depending on the nose. The genus name Rhus is the old Greek and Latin word for the sumacs, and the epithet aromatica names the scent directly.
Hardiness
Zones 3–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
4–6 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Sageretia theezans, the Chinese sweet plum, is a graceful evergreen shrub of the buckthorn family, native to southern China, where the plant grows to some three to eight feet with fine, zigzagging branches, small glossy leaves, and a handsome flaking, multicolored trunk. New growth often emerges bronze before settling to deep green, and in the mild-winter gardens that suit the species the foliage holds the year round, giving a dense, fine-textured presence rare in so tough a plant.
Salvia microphylla 'Deltoid' is a shrubby form of the littleleaf or baby sage grown for warm salmon-coral flowers and neat, triangular, deltoid leaves. The small tubular blooms open over a long season and read as a soft coral against the fine, glossy foliage, a gentler tone than the hot scarlet of many littleleaf sages.
Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips' is the famous temperature-shifting bicolor of the littleleaf sages, and the trick is worth the fame. In the cool of spring the flowers may open pure white or pure red, but as summer heat builds they turn strikingly two-tone, white below with a bold red lip, so that a single plant can carry white, red, and red-and-white flowers all at once. The show runs from late spring until frost.
