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.
Sweetbay magnolia ranges across the moist ground of the eastern United States, from Massachusetts to Texas, and in the South becomes the larger, evergreen tree botanists call Magnolia virginiana var. australis. 'Santa Rosa' is a superior evergreen selection of that southern variety, a Woodlanders introduction gathered in Santa Rosa County, in the Florida panhandle.
Sweetbay is one of the loveliest and most useful of the native magnolias, and this is Sweetbay from the far western edge of the range, the big-leaved, big-flowered form of the Louisiana and east Texas country long known in gardens as Magnolia virginiana ludoviciana. Set against the typical species, these western-Gulf plants carry noticeably larger leaves and flowers, with soft down on the undersides of the leaves and on the flower buds, and grow as small to medium trees of a more open, airy habit.
Hardiness
Zones 7–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
20–35 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, general wellness, pain relief
There is something quietly instructive about the range of Magnolia virginiana. The species runs from the cold, swampy woods of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where a small population clings to the northern edge of the natural territory, all the way down to the Gulf Coast of Texas, a span of climate and geography that would seem to demand two entirely different plants. In the North the sweetbay obliges by turning deciduous, multi-stemmed, and compact, staying modest in deference to the winters. In the South the same species becomes something else entirely, a tall, evergreen tree of real stature. Botanists eventually gave the northern form a name of its own, var. virginiana, and that is what Woodlanders grows here, raised from seed collected at the Massachusetts limit of the range.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
20–40 ft.
Spread
15–20 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, general wellness
Magnolia x foggii '#2' is a handsome evergreen hybrid, a large shrub or small upright tree grown for glossy year-round foliage and a generous early-spring flush of white, magnolia-like flowers about three inches across. The long, leathery leaves, three to five inches each, give the plant a lush, substantial look, and even a young plant flowers well.
Myrtus communis, the true myrtle, is a dense evergreen shrub of the Mediterranean, clothed in small, glossy, aromatic leaves and starry white flowers, and few garden plants carry so much history. Sacred to Aphrodite and to her Roman counterpart Venus, myrtle has stood for love, beauty, and marriage since antiquity, woven into bridal wreaths from ancient Greece to Victorian England, and a sprig from Queen Victoria's own bouquet founded a myrtle whose descendants still supply royal wedding flowers today.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
6–9 ft.
Spread
6–8 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
respiratory support, topical applications, digestive health
Few shrubs carry as much history as the oleander, grown around the Mediterranean and across the warm world since antiquity. The name Nerium traces to the Greek neros, meaning moist or watery, a nod to the streamsides and dry watercourses where oleander naturally takes hold, while the old name oleander seems to braid together olea, the olive, and the leathery, lance-shaped leaves the two plants share. Those dark green leaves stand in tidy whorls of three along long, sparingly branched stems, giving the shrub a poised, upright architecture even out of flower.
Nerium oleander has been grown around the Mediterranean since antiquity, the name Nerium drawn from the Greek neros, watery, for the streamsides where the shrub grows wild. 'Variegata' brings that ancient toughness together with luminous foliage: narrow, leathery leaves edged in creamy white around a deep green center, held in whorls along the stems so the whole shrub seems lightly frosted even when out of flower.
Nerium oleander is among the oldest shrubs in cultivation, grown around the Mediterranean since antiquity and named from the Greek neros, watery, for the streamsides and washes where oleander grows wild. The dark green, leathery, lance-shaped leaves sit in tidy whorls of three along long, sparingly branched stems, lending the shrub a clean, upright presence in every season.
Alabama snow-wreath is one of the Southeast's rarest native shrubs and one of the easiest to grow, a combination that ought to put the plant in far more gardens than it occupies. In spring the arching, thicket-forming branches foam with feathery white flowers, and the trick of them is that there are no petals at all: the show is pure stamen, dozens of white filaments per bloom spraying out against five small greenish sepals, like little bottlebrushes of light along the stems.
Nyssa ogeche, the Ogeechee tupelo, is a medium-sized deciduous tree of the southeastern Coastal Plain, at home from southern South Carolina through the Ogeechee valley of Georgia into northern Florida and Alabama. The genus name honors Nyssa, a water nymph of Greek myth, and the tree lives up to the name, thriving along creeks, river swamps, and seasonally flooded bottoms where the soil stays acidic and wet.
Devilwood earns the odd name honestly. Osmanthus americanus carries a wood so cross-grained and stubborn that early woodworkers swore the timber was possessed, and the name has stuck for centuries, a small piece of American folklore hung on an otherwise gracious plant. The leaves are leathery, elliptical, and smooth-margined, a deep glossy green without the spines that arm so many tea olives, and they build into a dense, rounded evergreen of fifteen to twenty-five feet, handsome as screen, understory, or small tree.
Some plants are grown for the eye and some for the nose, and sweet osmanthus belongs wholly to the second camp. The very name tells the story: Osmanthus joins the Greek osme, a scent, with anthos, a flower, and fragrans doubles down, so the botanical name reads almost as fragrant fragrant-flower. The blooms themselves are tiny, waxy, and creamy white, tucked so far back among the leaves that a passerby often smells the plant long before finding the flowers, a warm apricot-and-honey perfume that carries across a whole garden on a mild autumn day.
For all the sweet osmanthus grown across the South, most carry the same tiny white flowers, so 'Conger Yellow' arrives as a quiet surprise: a clone bearing clusters of soft, butter-yellow blooms against notably large, glossy leaves. The flowers keep the family gift, that warm apricot-and-honey perfume that drifts on autumn air and, in mild climates, returns in scattered flushes through much of the year, strongest as evening cools.
'Fudingzhu' turns the usual tea olive up a notch. Where most sweet osmanthus scatter a modest few flowers among the leaves, this selection smothers itself in dense, bead-like clusters of small, creamy-white blooms, so freely and for so long that the name is said to mean pearls upon the Buddha's head, for the way the pale flowers crown the plant. The scent is the pure osmanthus perfume, a rich sweetness of ripe apricot and peach that carries on the evening air.
The orange sweet olive is the tea olive at full volume. Where the common form carries tiny white flowers, Osmanthus fragrans f. aurantiacus bears clusters of deep yellow to burnt orange, and the color comes with an even richer scent, a heady sweetness of ripe apricot and peach that fills a garden on a still autumn afternoon. The blooms open in one great, concentrated flush, brief at perhaps a week or two, but so heavy that the whole plant seems to smoke with fragrance while it lasts.
Osmanthus x fortunei 'Natchez' is a hybrid that takes the best of two parents. The cross joins Osmanthus fragrans, the sweet olive treasured for its perfume, with Osmanthus heterophyllus, the false holly valued for tough, spiny, evergreen foliage, and 'Natchez' inherits both gifts: a dense, glossy, holly-leaved frame and a flood of fragrance in fall. The hybrid takes the name of the old river town of Natchez, Mississippi, a nod to the Deep South gardens where these tea olives have long been at home.
Osmanthus x fortunei 'San Jose' is a large, upright member of Fortune's tea olive, the garden hybrid that crosses the false holly, Osmanthus heterophyllus, with the sweet olive, Osmanthus fragrans. Among the fortunei clones, 'San Jose' stands apart for thinner, more finely toothed leaves and a taller, more upright habit, a plant that reaches for height where others spread.
Osteomeles schweriniae, the bone apple, is a refined evergreen shrub in the rose family, close kin to hawthorn, cotoneaster, and photinia, and a botanical rarity seldom seen in American gardens. The genus name joins the Greek osteon, bone, and melon, apple, a nod to the stony hardness of the little fruits, while the species epithet honors the German dendrologist Count Fritz von Schwerin. Native to the dry valleys and open slopes of Yunnan and western Sichuan in southwestern China, the shrub carries very small, ferny, pinnate leaves along dense, wiry, arching stems, giving a fine texture unusual among broadleaf evergreens.
Oxydendrum arboreum, the sourwood, is one of the loveliest and most distinctive trees of the Eastern American woods, and among the very last to flower each year. The name tells the story twice over: Oxydendrum joins the Greek oxys, sour or sharp, and dendron, tree, while the common name echoes the same tang, for the leaves, twigs, and bark all taste sourly of oxalic acid when chewed. A member of the heath family alongside azaleas, rhododendrons, and blueberries, sourwood stands alone as the sole species in the genus, native to well-drained, acid woodland soils from southern Pennsylvania to the Florida panhandle and west toward Louisiana, most abundant in the lower Appalachians.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
30–50 ft.
Spread
15–25 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
digestive health, respiratory support, general wellness
Photinia integrifolia is a handsome broadleaf evergreen, a small tree or large shrub of the rose family, widespread through the hills of southern and southeastern Asia, from the Himalayas and the Western Ghats of India east into Southeast Asia, yet virtually unknown in American gardens. A relative of the familiar Chinese photinia (Photinia serrulata), the species carries the same glossy, leathery foliage but with untoothed, entire-margined leaves, the trait behind the epithet integrifolia.
