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.
Lagerstroemia limii is the crepe myrtle almost nobody grows, and that is precisely the reason to seek the plant out. Rare in gardens and known mostly to breeders and botanic collections, this Chinese species trades the familiar look of the summer crepe myrtle for something bolder and stranger: broad, blue-green leaves far larger than those of the common sort, and open, pyramidal panicles of lavender-pink bloom carried through the warm months.
No plant carries a heavier freight of story than Laurus nobilis, the bay laurel of the Mediterranean and the original laurel of the victor's crown. The genus name is simply the classical Latin for the tree, and the epithet nobilis means noble or renowned, a fair description of a plant whose leaves once crowned poets, athletes, and returning generals. The whole vocabulary of achievement still leans on this tree: a baccalaureate, a poet laureate, and the warning not to rest on one's laurels all trace back to the wreath of bay. In Greek myth the laurel was born of unrequited love, when the nymph Daphne, fleeing Apollo, was changed into a laurel tree by her father the river god; ever after the god wore the leaves in her memory, and the tree became sacred to him.
There are plants that offer fragrance, and then there are plants that conjure memory. Lavandula dentata, with silvery, sawtoothed leaves and near ever-blooming lavender plumes, belongs firmly to the second kind, a bearer of the sort of scent that lingers in a sun-warmed linen chest or in the folds of a well-worn book left on a porch rail.
Hardiness
Zones 8–11
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, topical applications, respiratory support, digestive health
Lavandula × intermedia is the lavender that finally makes sense of the Southeast. A natural and cultivated cross between English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) and spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia), the plant is known in Provence as lavandin, and there the sterile, vigorous hybrid has long been the mainstay of the perfume fields, prized for a heavier yield of fragrant oil than either parent alone. The name records that middle ground: intermedia, intermediate, a lavender poised between the sweet refinement of the English kind and the camphorous punch of the spike.
Hardiness
Zones 5–9
Light
Full Sun
Height
2–3 ft.
Spread
2–3 ft.
Bloom
Purple
Plant type
Shrub
Traditional use
mental & emotional well-being, topical applications, respiratory support
Leucothoe populifolia, still fondly called Agarista populifolia by those who knew the plant before the name changed, is the giant of a genus otherwise built low to the ground. Where most leucothoes hug the shade at knee height, this one climbs, sending up tall, erect stems that arch at the tips into a fountain of glossy evergreen leaves, and given years and room the shrub can pass for a small multi-stemmed tree of twelve to fifteen feet.
Leucothoe racemosa, the sweetbells of Eastern wetland edges, is a fine native shrub too seldom planted. Found wild across the eastern United States in acidic woodland soils that stay damp but never flood, the plant grows upright and loosely branched to six or eight feet, deciduous to semi-evergreen depending on the winter. Botanists now file the species under the name Eubotrys racemosa, though the older Leucothoe is the name most gardeners still use.
Ligustrum quihoui, the waxyleaf or Quihou privet, saves the family's best trick for last. Where most privets flower in late spring, this species from northern and central China waits until late summer and even early autumn, then covers itself in long, airy panicles of small creamy-white flowers, sweetly and unmistakably fragrant. In a season when the flowering shrubs are mostly finished, that late show is worth a good deal.
An evergreen spicebush is a rare thing, and Lindera akoensis is one of the best. Woodlanders grew this shrub from cuttings taken in the garden of Bobby Green of Green's Nursery in Fairhope, Alabama, shared simply as an evergreen Lindera from Taiwan. The plant matches the botanical description of Lindera akoensis, a species of low mountain woodland in Taiwan, and has proven a handsome, glossy-leaved evergreen for the southern garden.
Lindera megaphylla is a plant for the patient collector, a broad-leaved evergreen of real presence and pedigree that reveals itself over seasons rather than days. The species comes from the mist-laden mountain forests of western China, where the shrub grows in dappled light among rhododendrons and ancient oaks. Sir Harold Hillier, the great British plantsman, first shared this rarity with Western gardens in the 1970s from his famous nursery, and even now the Chinese spicebush remains uncommon in cultivation.
A broadleaf evergreen with a story, this variegated tanbark oak came into the country from Japan through the late Dr. Fred Meyer of the United States National Arboretum, a botanist and tireless plant explorer, and was almost certainly first offered to American gardeners by Woodlanders. The draw is the foliage: dense, leathery, glossy leaves, each dark green blade split by an irregular central streak of gold and cream, so that a whole tree seems lit from within. Plant Delights later distributed the same selection under the name 'Starburst,' and both names point to this one bright-leaved plant.
Lithocarpus henryi, the Henry tanoak, is an evergreen cousin of the oaks that few gardeners have met. Native to the mountain forests of central China, the tree carries long, narrow, pointed leaves of glossy deep green and builds, in time, a dense, rounded evergreen crown of fifteen to twenty-five feet. Among a genus of mostly tender species, this one ranks as the hardiest, which is what makes the Henry tanoak worth seeking out for milder temperate gardens.
Lomatia myricoides is an Australian rarity that has quietly proven itself in the American Southeast, and that combination is the whole appeal. A member of the Proteaceae, the great Southern Hemisphere family of banksias, grevilleas, and the waratah, this evergreen shrub spreads wide and low, clothed in long, narrow, sharply toothed leaves, and carries sprays of creamy-white, spidery flowers in the heat of midsummer, sweetly fragrant at close range.
Lonicera sempervirens 'Sulphurea' is coral honeysuckle gone golden, a yellow-flowered form of the native trumpet honeysuckle that trades the usual scarlet for clear, soft sulphur-yellow. The tubular flowers cluster in tiered whorls at the branch tips from late spring through summer, glowing against fresh green leaves so the whole vine looks sunlit even under a gray sky.
Loropetalum chinense 'Zhuzhou Fuchsia' is Chinese fringe flower at full volume: deep, wine-purple evergreen foliage set alight in spring by tassels of vivid fuchsia-pink bloom. Each flower is a little spray of narrow, strap-shaped petals, fringe-like and slightly whimsical, clustered thickly along the branches so the whole shrub seems to smoulder pink against purple.
Luma apiculata, the Chilean myrtle, is grown above all for the extraordinary bark: smooth, sinuous trunks in warm cinnamon-orange that peel to reveal cream beneath, a living sculpture that glows in low winter light. An evergreen of the myrtle family, Myrtaceae, the plant hails from the temperate rainforests of Chile and neighboring Argentina, where whole groves, most famously the Bosque de Arrayanes on Lake Nahuel Huapi, are built of these twisting, apricot-barked trunks.
Lyonia lucida, the fetterbush, is one of the quiet evergreen pleasures of the Southeastern wetlands, a shrub of upright, arching stems clothed in glossy, leathery leaves. Look closely and each smooth leaf shows a fine vein running just inside the margin, a neat identifying mark, and the species name lucida, Latin for shining, salutes that polished surface. The common name comes from the dense, tangling thickets the shrub forms in the wild, said to fetter anyone trying to walk through.
Lyonia lucida 'Morris Minor' is Woodlanders' own compact selection of the native fetterbush, a tidier, smaller-leaved form of one of the Southeast's finest evergreen shrubs. The name is a small joke and a tribute at once: the little, rounded leaves recall the Morris Minor motorcar, and the selection honors the landowner, Mr. Morris, on whose property the original plant was found.
Magnolia acuminata, the cucumbertree, is the giant of the native magnolias and the only one hardy far into the North. A deciduous forest tree of the eastern United States, most majestic in the southern Appalachians, the cucumbertree can rise seventy to ninety feet into a broad, rounded canopy, valued as a fast-growing, exceptionally hardy shade tree for parks and large lawns.
Magnolia ashei, the Ashe magnolia, is one of the great show-offs of the plant world packed into a shrub-sized frame. The enormous leaves, often two feet long and nearly a foot wide, give a decidedly tropical air, and the flowers are astonishing: creamy-white goblets up to a foot across, sweetly fragrant, each marked with a bold purple blotch at the base of the inner petals. Best of all, the Ashe magnolia blooms while still young and small, sometimes at barely knee height, a rare gift among magnolias.
Magnolia ashei × macrophylla is a rare hybrid of colossal foliage and dinner-plate blooms, a deliberate cross between two of North America's most dramatic native magnolias: the endangered Ashe magnolia, Magnolia ashei, and the bigleaf magnolia, Magnolia macrophylla. The cross brings together the best of both parents, the immense tropical-looking leaves, the enormous fragrant flowers, and a habit that settles into a handsome middle ground between shrub and small tree.
