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.
'Balsaminaeflorum' is a dwarf evergreen Satsuki azalea, an old Japanese cultivar of Rhododendron indicum grown for flowers that look less like azaleas than like tiny roses. Each bloom is fully double, packed with forty or more petals and carrying neither pistil nor stamens, so the flower is all soft, ruffled color. The cultivar name means balsam-flowered, a nod to the double blooms of the garden balsam, while indicum, meaning of India, is an old misnomer for a plant that is in fact Japanese.
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.
A three-hundred-year-old Japanese garden azalea that does not look quite like a rhododendron, does not look quite like an azalea, and does not really look like anything else. The leaves are narrow green ribbons, three to five millimeters wide and a couple of inches long, closer to willow or fine grass than to the broad rounded foliage of an ordinary tsutsuji. The flowers, opening in late April and May, follow the same grammar: deeply divided into long strap-like petals in lilac-pink to lavender-rose, tangled and knotted at first, then unfurling slowly into a shape that reads, depending on the eye, as a crane fly, a spider, or a piece of decorative garnish. Wabi-sabi made evergreen.
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.
'Koromo Shikibu' is the spider azalea, and there is nothing else in the genus quite like the flower. Instead of the usual funnel, each bloom splits into narrow, strap-like petals that spread apart like the legs of a starfish or a spider, lavender to purplish-pink, spotted darker at the base, and carried in such profusion in spring that the whole shrub seems to shimmer. Once seen, the flower is not forgotten.
A spontaneous hybrid, probably including Rhododendron alabamense, R. canescens, and R. flammeum, and blooming in mid-spring. Woodlanders regularly offers several numbered selections in our "Pastel Series," which we introduced, and this is number four. A happy blend of colors that adds interest to any garden.
'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.
A rare evergreen shrub or small tree from southern China and the neighboring subtropics, Rhodoleia championii is a connoisseur's plant, dramatic in bloom, refined in habit, and quietly excellent the year round. Thick, glossy, rounded leaves cloak the plant in deep green, and their softly glaucous, blue-gray undersides catch the light and every passing breeze, giving even the out-of-flower plant a handsome, layered presence.
Jetbead is an old-fashioned, exceptionally tough deciduous shrub of the rose family, forming an open, multi-stemmed mound roughly three to six feet tall and four to nine feet wide on arching gray-brown stems. The opposite, sharply toothed leaves break very early in spring, and four-petaled white flowers about two inches across open at the shoot tips in May and June. Clusters of three or four glossy black drupes follow in fall and hang on well into winter, the shining beads that give jetbead the common name.
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
The swamp rose is one of the few roses that truly loves wet feet, a tall, graceful native shrub of the eastern United States that grows wild along pond edges, streambanks, and in the low, seasonally flooded ground where garden roses would drown. Reaching four to eight feet on arching, sparingly thorny canes, the plant opens fragrant, single, clear pink flowers through the summer, each a simple five-petaled saucer around a boss of gold stamens, a soft, untamed beauty far from the tidy hybrid tea.
Rubus coronarius, often called the Easter Rose, is one of those plants that gently refuses categorization. Botanically the species sits squarely among the brambles, a blackberry relative, yet in bloom the shrub bears no resemblance to anything prickly or wild. In place of the usual bramble flower comes a flush of large, fully double white blooms that read far more like heirloom roses than raspberries, each one softly luminous and timed, in the mildest springs, to open around Easter, from which the common name follows.
Ruscus aculeatus, Butcher's Broom, is a low evergreen shrub of the asparagus family, native to the woodlands of southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East, and reaching north into the milder parts of the British Isles. What look like glossy, spine-tipped leaves are not leaves at all but flattened stems called cladodes, which take over the work of photosynthesis while the true leaves are reduced to tiny scales. The generic name comes from the Latin ruscum, the old word for a butcher's broom, and the epithet aculeatus means prickled, for the sharp point that tips each cladode.
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.
Salix eriocephala, the heart-leaved or Missouri River willow, is a graceful native shrub, sometimes a modest multi-stemmed tree, of riverbanks and wet meadows across northern and eastern North America. The plant rises on several trunks clad in coarse gray bark, reaching roughly eight to a dozen feet in the garden and more in wild thickets, and the epithet eriocephala, meaning woolly-headed, points to the soft, silky catkins that give the willow much of its charm.
The willows gave the world its first painkiller. Willow bark, steeped by Greek and Native American healers alike for fever and ache, carries salicin, the compound nineteenth-century chemists refined into salicylic acid and, in time, aspirin, which still wears the genus name buried in the chemistry. This particular willow comes by a quieter trade. Salix koriyanagi is the Korean basket willow, the name meaning just that, long grown across Korea, Japan, and China for slender rods woven into baskets and furniture by hands that wanted something straight, supple, and strong.
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.
