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.
Once thought lost to time and development, Cyrilla arida, known as Scrub Titi, is a botanical rarity with a story as striking as the summer bloom. The famed botanist J.K. Small first described this shrub in the early twentieth century from the desert-like scrub of central Florida. For decades the identity of Scrub Titi was debated and any wild presence uncertain, until a dedicated search led to rediscovery by Kenneth Wurdack and the Woodlanders team in Highlands County, Florida. That tiny remnant population may now be gone, and Cyrilla arida may no longer exist in the wild, which makes every plant in cultivation all the more precious.
Cyrilla parviflora, the Littleleaf Cyrilla, is a small, understated shrub that carries the quiet resilience of the southeastern wetlands. A close relative of the larger Cyrilla racemiflora, this plant offers a finer, more delicate presence, with slender glossy leaves and airy clusters of tiny white flowers.
Cyrilla parvifolia 'Small Leaf' is a rare, fine-textured native selection that we collected in Franklin County, Florida, prized for the distinctly small, evergreen leaves and the delicate, branching habit. Though sometimes grouped botanically with Cyrilla racemiflora, the more widespread Coastal Titi, this selection stands apart in both form and foliage, an easy standout in native and ornamental plantings alike.
Titi is one of the quiet workhorses of the southern wetland, an evergreen to semi-evergreen shrub or small tree that ranges farther than almost any other native of the region, from the coastal plain of southern Virginia down through Florida and west to eastern Texas. In the wild the plant haunts the edges of swamps, bays, and blackwater streams, standing in the wet, acid ground where few woody plants thrive, yet takes with surprising ease to ordinary garden soil.
'Graniteville' is a low, ground-hugging selection of Cyrilla racemiflora, the native Titi, and one of the more distinctive forms of a plant already known for variability. Where the species can build into a small tree, this Woodlanders introduction stays wide and knee-high, and the story behind the plant is a piece of local botanizing: we propagated 'Graniteville' from an almost prostrate individual found years ago on an eroded sandhills seepage slope near Graniteville, South Carolina, and the ground-hugging habit has held true ever since in cultivation.
Diospyros texana, the Texas persimmon, is a small, tough native tree grown above all for the bark, which peels away in thin flakes to reveal a smooth, mottled patchwork of white, gray, and pink beneath. Intricately and crookedly branched, this is a sculptural little tree, as handsome bare in winter as it is in leaf. A creature of the Texas hill country and northern Mexico, the Texas persimmon shrugs off heat, drought, and lean limestone soil that would defeat softer plants.
The botanical name reads like a compliment: Diospyros joins the Greek dios, divine, to pyros, grain, so the genus translates roughly as "fruit of the gods," a lofty title for a tree that drops sweet, homely orange fruit onto the forest floor each autumn. The common name travels the other direction, plain and American, from the Powhatan word putchamin for a dried fruit, a reminder that Native peoples were drying persimmons into cakes long before the botanists arrived.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
55–60 ft.
Spread
30–35 ft.
Bloom
Yellow
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, topical applications, general wellness
Dirca palustris, the leatherwood, is a quiet native shrub with a hidden trick: branches so supple and tough they can be bent, twisted, even tied in a knot without snapping. That remarkable pliability, born of unusually soft, low-lignin wood, gave rise to the names leatherwood and ropebark, and made the bark a favorite of Native peoples for cordage. A slow, rounded, understory shrub of rich eastern woodlands, leatherwood is seldom offered and quietly prized by those who know it.
Anacua, Ehretia anacua, is one of the signature small trees of the south Texas brush country and the lower Rio Grande, a member of the borage family that goes by a small crowd of names. The rough, sandpapery upper surface of the leaves earns the tag sandpaper tree, while old-timers along the border call the tree anacua or, corrupted through generations, knockaway. Evergreen to semi-evergreen depending on the winter, the anacua holds dark green, leathery leaves that feel like fine grit under a thumb.
Elliottia racemosa, the Georgia plume, is one of the rarest and most coveted of all southeastern native plants, a deciduous shrub or small tree that lifts great feathery plumes of white flowers in the heat of summer. First found by the naturalist William Bartram in 1775 and named for the botanist Stephen Elliott, this member of the heath family grows wild in only a scattering of Georgia localities and almost nowhere else on earth. To grow one is to hold a genuine botanical treasure.
In the quiet understory of the Eastern woodlands grows a shrub of subtle grace and striking autumn drama: Euonymus americanus, the American strawberry bush, known just as fondly by the folk name hearts-a-bustin'. This native, deciduous to semi-evergreen shrub sends up slender, distinctly green, angular stems clad in opposite, lance-shaped leaves to about three inches long. Through spring and summer the plant keeps to the shade of oak, hickory, and pine, quietly content in fertile, moist, well-drained soil.
The American beech is one of the great presences of the eastern woods, a large, slow-growing deciduous tree that ranges through rich forests from southern Canada to the Gulf. Toothed oval leaves, several inches long, emerge a clean bright green, turn clear yellow in fall and then a warm russet-brown, and cling to the branches through much of winter, a habit called marcescence that gives the bare woods a soft papery whisper. The trunk is the signature: smooth, silver-gray, and elephantine, so inviting that generations have carved their initials into the living bark, a temptation best resisted since the wounds never truly heal.
Swamp privet, Forestiera acuminata, is a native deciduous shrub or small tree of the wet South, at home in the flood-prone bottoms and streambanks from Texas east to South Carolina and up the Mississippi Valley as far as Illinois and Indiana. A member of the olive family, Oleaceae, and a distant cousin of the true privets, the plant shrugs off standing water and seasonal flooding with an ease few woody plants can match.
Forestiera angustifolia 'Weeping' is a distinctive pendulous form of the Texas desert olive, an intricately branched native shrub whose cascading, weeping branches make it a living piece of sculpture. Fine and twiggy, clothed in small narrow leaves, the plant drapes and tumbles in a way the wild shrub never does, and reveals a fine tracery of branches in winter once the leaves have fallen. Tough as the Texas brush country that bore it, this is a plant grown as much for form as for foliage, and a favorite subject for bonsai.
'Sea Spray' has long traveled under the name Fothergilla major, a tidy assumption the botanists have since complicated. Run through a flow cytometer, the plant turns out to be a hybrid, F. × intermedia, the meeting of mountain witch-alder (F. major) and the dwarf coastal F. gardenii, the little shrub Charleston's Alexander Garden sent across to England in the 1760s, in a genus already named for John Fothergill, the London physician who tried to grow half of America in a single garden. All of which makes the name, for once, honest. Most Sea Spray christenings are wishful; this one actually carries the coast in the blood.
Fothergilla gardenii is a small deciduous shrub, usually three to four feet tall, and a native of the southeastern coastal plain, where the plant haunts moist, peaty pinelands and bogs. A member of the witch-hazel family, Hamamelidaceae, and a close cousin of the witch-hazels themselves, dwarf fothergilla shares the family gift for honey-scented late-winter and spring bloom on bare or barely-leafed stems.
The native fothergillas were choice but scarcely available garden shrubs when Woodlanders first began to offer them back in 1980. This one, a hybrid of Fothergilla gardenii and F. major, was found by Dr. Michael Dirr at the Mt. Airy Arboretum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has since become the most widely grown fothergilla of all, and deservedly so.
Some plants elevate the familiar into the extraordinary, and Gordonia lasianthus 'Variegata' does exactly that, taking the quiet majesty of the native loblolly bay and dressing it in a silken fringe of cream. The glossy green leaves are edged in irregular strokes of ivory, as though touched by the brush of some moonlit painter in the pine woods, and the whole shrub glimmers softly through every season.
