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.
Buddleia davidii 'Attraction' is a more compact butterfly bush than the usual run of the species, forming a rounded shrub of arching branches lined with gray-green leaves. From summer into fall, royal red, fragrant flowers gather in nodding panicles six to ten inches long, drawing butterflies and bees in profusion.
'Lochinch' is one of the most refined of the butterfly bushes, a cross of Buddleia davidii and the silvery Buddleia fallowiana that takes the best of both: dense, fragrant panicles of soft lavender-blue, each tiny flower lit by a small orange eye, over handsome gray-green, almost silver foliage. Compact and rounded, the shrub blooms all summer into fall on the new growth.
'Miss Ruby' is the butterfly bush that finally cracked the color barrier: a striking, near-sterile hybrid of Buddleia davidii and Buddleia globosa carrying racemes of bright, purplish pink, a magenta few other butterfly bushes can touch. The shrub was bred by Dr. Dennis Werner at the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, North Carolina, the source of our cuttings.
Endemic to the mountain scrub of Madagascar, where the plant scrambles along slopes between two and six thousand feet, Buddleja madagascariensis throws out long arching canes that will climb to ten feet given a wall to lean on. The flowers come in late winter and spring on terminal panicles up to ten inches long, opening deep yellow and aging through orange to soft pink along the same spike, all of it carrying a honeyed fragrance strong enough to scent a courtyard. The leaves are narrowly ovate, dark green above, silvery and felted beneath, so the whole shrub seems to flicker when wind moves through the canes.
This is a Woodlanders plant in the most literal sense: selected, named, and introduced to the American nursery trade by this nursery, in this town, decades ago. The cultivar now carries our name across the country. One Green World in Oregon, Cistus on Sauvie Island, Greenleaf as a national wholesaler, Wilson Bros in three-gallon, Cloud Mountain Farm in Washington, Dancing Oaks in the Willamette Valley, and dozens of regional nurseries from Louisiana to Idaho all carry the plant. Few cultivars in American horticulture are so permanently tied to a single small nursery in Aiken, South Carolina. To buy here is to buy at the source.
Some plants are loved for how they look. Calycanthus floridus is loved for how they smell, which is a different and older kind of attachment. The flowers are strange and handsome in their own right, an inch or two across, dark maroon going toward burgundy, built from many narrow strap-like segments with no clear line between petal and sepal, somewhere between a small magnolia and something from the bottom of the sea. But the reason this shrub has been passed down through Southern gardens for three centuries is what happens when the flowers open on a warm day: a deep fruit-bowl perfume, strawberry and pineapple and ripe banana, that drifts well beyond the plant.
Born of careful hands and watchful eyes at the JC Raulston Arboretum in North Carolina, Calycanthus × raulstonii 'Hartlage Wine' is a sweetshrub of uncommon grace. Richard Hartlage made the cross as an undergraduate at North Carolina State University in 1991, pairing the Southern native Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus) with the refined Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis); the seedling first flowered in 1996, and the hybrid name honors J.C. Raulston, the arboretum's late director.
This is the tea plant. Not a tea plant but the tea plant. Every cup of green tea, black tea, white tea, oolong, and pu-erh on Earth comes from a single species, Camellia sinensis. The differences in flavor and color come from the timing of the harvest and the way the leaves are handled afterward: green tea from the youngest leaves, briefly steamed; white tea from the unopened buds; black tea from fully oxidized older leaves; oolong from partial oxidation. One plant, many fates.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Part Shade
Height
4–8 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
general wellness, heart support, mental & emotional well-being, immune support, digestive health
A native of China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and parts of South Asia, Clerodendrum trichotomum has been cultivated in Western gardens since the mid-1800s, when the shrub was introduced from Japan and quickly adopted across Europe and the American South for uncanny late-season performance. This is the hardiest member of the genus and, for our money, the most theatrical.
Clethra alnifolia, the summersweet or sweet pepperbush, is a deciduous native of the eastern United States, at home along pond edges, in damp woods, and at the margins of coastal swamps from Maine to Florida. The species spreads gently by suckers into colonies of upright stems, and earns the name sweet pepperbush from the small, peppercorn-like seed capsules that follow the flowers and hang on through winter. For all that, the summer flowers are the reason to grow them: erect bottlebrush spikes, intensely honey-scented, that open over many weeks in the heat of July and August when little else in the shrub border is in bloom.
Clinopodium georgianum is a low, aromatic shrublet of the mint family, prized for highly scented foliage and clouds of pinkish-lavender flowers in late summer and fall, when much of the garden is winding down. Georgia savory makes a fine edging or front-of-border plant for sunny or lightly shaded spots with good drainage, and unlike most of the tribe, this southern native will grow in heavier soils as well as sand.
Conradina canescens 'Gray Mound' is a silver-leaved selection of the false rosemary that grows wild on the deep, pine-fringed sands of the northern Gulf Coast, in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Florida panhandle, where the species once mingled with sea oats and longleaf pine. A member of the mint family, this aromatic shrub carries soft, needle-like foliage in a ghostly silver-gray, and from spring into early summer, sometimes again in the cool of fall, offers a flush of pale lavender to bluish, two-lipped flowers that native bees and butterflies work eagerly.
Few plants carry a story like the Franklin tree. Collected from the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia by John and William Bartram in the 1760s and named by them for their friend Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia alatamaha was last seen growing wild around 1803 and has never been found in nature since. Every Franklinia alive today, in every garden and arboretum on earth, descends from the seed the Bartrams carried home to Philadelphia. To grow one is to hold a living piece of that lineage.
The gardenia needs no introduction in the South; the scent alone has been stopping people in driveways for generations. What 'Chuck Hayes' adds to that old story is nerve in the cold. The line traces back to the late 1970s and a Virginia Beach nurseryman named Charlie Hayes, who noticed a single-flowered gardenia that had come through a brutal freeze unbothered. He crossed that survivor with a double-flowered plant and handed the seedlings to Dan Milbocker, a horticulturist at the Hampton Roads research station, who grew them out, picked the toughest, and eventually released the plant under Hayes's name. The result is a fully double, classically fragrant gardenia that behaves as a far more delicate shrub has no right to.
Spicebush is the shrub that tells you the ground is good. Early land surveyors in the eastern states used Lindera benzoin as an indicator of rich agricultural soil, and the rule holds in the garden: where spicebush thrives, most things will. The plant is a common understory shrub of moist, rich woods from Ontario to Florida and west to Texas, growing six to twelve feet in a loose rounded mass, often colonial from root sprouts, and every part smells of citrus and pepper when bruised.
This quietly handsome evergreen has grown well for years in the Woodlanders garden here in Aiken, South Carolina, holding a place in semi-shade where many broadleaf evergreens sulk. The spicebush earns a spot on foliage alone: glossy, leathery leaves, roughly heart-shaped and about three inches across, each marked by three bold veins, with new growth flushing a soft bronze before deepening to green.
Hardiness
Zones 8–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
6–10 ft.
Spread
4–6 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
digestive health, pain relief, reproductive health
In the dead of winter, when the garden asks for little and gives less, Lonicera × purpusii answers with perfume. This winter honeysuckle is a hybrid of two Chinese species, Lonicera fragrantissima and Lonicera standishii, and carries the best of both: small, creamy-white, tubular flowers that open along the bare stems from late winter into early spring, throwing a clean, lemon-sweet fragrance that carries yards on a mild day.
Magnolia virginiana, the sweetbay magnolia, has long been a tree of distinction in the American landscape, ranging from the cool wetlands of Massachusetts to the Gulf Coast. Across that span the species wears two very different guises. In the northern states the sweetbay is a smaller, often shrubby tree that drops its leaves in winter; in the Deep South the species reaches fullest expression as Magnolia virginiana var. australis, the evergreen southern sweetbay, a large and enduring tree of great grace.
Morella pumila is the dwarf waxmyrtle, a low, native evergreen that keeps everything gardeners love about the common wax myrtle, aromatic foliage, waxy berries, and a tough constitution, and shrinks it all to knee height. Native to the frequently burned pinelands of the southern United States, the plant is an adaptation to that fiery world, staying small and spreading slowly into dense patches and colonies by underground runners.
Myrcianthes fragrans is a member of the myrtle family native to the hammocks and coastal scrub of Florida and the Caribbean, the same botanical neighborhood as guava and allspice, which says something about the family character and the quality of the fragrance involved. Crush a leaf and the scent is immediate and specific: nutmeg with a citrus edge, clean and resinous in a way that makes the plant worth encountering even out of flower. The tiny, deep green leaves hold the aromatic oils responsible, and keep that quality year-round.
