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.
Callicarpa americana 'Bok Tower' is the white-fruited form of the American beautyberry, swapping the species' electric magenta for clusters of clean, pearly white berries that ring the arching stems in late summer and fall. The pale fruit is cool and luminous, lovely against the green leaves and a striking foil to the purple-berried kinds, and just as good for the birds.
Everyone who grows the native beautyberry knows the plant by the autumn display: those improbable whorls of magenta-purple fruit circling every stem like something a florist arranged and forgot to bill for. 'Welch's Pink' is that plant, in a color the species was not supposed to have.
'Profusion' is the beautyberry that finally made the genus behave. A Dutch selection out of Callicarpa bodinieri var. giraldii, a deciduous shrub from west and central China, this clone was chosen for one quality above all: fruit, in quantity, on a young plant, without needing a second shrub nearby to make it happen. Upright arching canes reach eight to ten feet, carrying bronze-purple new growth that shifts to pinkish purple in autumn. Small lilac-pink flowers open at the end of summer, unremarkable and much loved by bees. Then in October the point of the whole thing arrives: tight clusters of berries in a violet so saturated and so metallic that first-time visitors routinely assume the shrub has been sprayed. The berries hold on long after the leaves have gone, which is exactly when a garden needs them.
Callicarpa dichotoma belongs to the mint family, Lamiaceae, though the beautyberries wear their kinship lightly. The genus name comes from the Greek kallos, beauty, and karpos, fruit, a promise the plant keeps every autumn, while the epithet dichotoma describes the way the slender branches fork in neat pairs, giving the shrub a tiered, arching silhouette. Native across East Asia, from China and Korea into Japan and Vietnam, the purple beautyberry has long been grown for that moment in late summer when clusters of small violet fruits ripen along the stems and hold on well after the leaves have gone.
Callicarpa formosana, the Taiwan beautyberry, is a handsome deciduous shrub that lines the stems with vivid purple berries in fall, the clusters glowing against the fading leaves for strong late-season color. Native to Taiwan and southern China, the Taiwan beautyberry is built for warm climates and keeps a fuller, more robust frame than the smaller Asian beautyberries.
Callistemon brachyandrus, the prickly or desert bottlebrush, comes from the arid inland of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, and wears that origin in every part. The short, stiff, needle-fine leaves end in a sharp point and give the shrub the prickly common name, a fine gray-green texture quite unlike the broad-leaved bottlebrushes. The brushes are the real surprise: deep red stamens tipped with yellow anthers, so each flower looks dusted with gold, and they open in summer, after most other bottlebrush have finished.
Callistemon citrinus, the crimson bottlebrush, is the plant most people picture when they hear the common name, and the parent of a good share of the red-flowered selections in the trade. The lance-shaped leaves emerge coppery and pink, harden to a soft gray-green, and give up a clean lemon scent when bruised, the trait the species epithet records. Bright crimson brushes, four inches or so, come in a heavy flush in late spring and then intermittently through the warm months, each one a generous well of nectar for hummingbirds and bees.
Callistemon macropunctatus, the scarlet bottlebrush, is a plant of the drier inland country of southeastern Australia, and the toughness shows. The narrow, sharply pointed leaves are studded with large oil glands, the big dots the species epithet names, and release a sharp, resinous scent when crushed. Flowering runs from olive-green in bud to a deep scarlet as the brushes open across late spring and summer, vivid against the stiff foliage.
An evergreen bottlebrush with arching to pendulous branches and dark green, lance-shaped leaves, Callistemon paludosus carries terminal, pink bottlebrush spikes freely in midsummer, an unusual color in a genus mostly given to red. Relatively cold-hardy for a bottlebrush, this is a graceful, easy shrub for a hot, sunny spot.
An exceptional cold-hardy bottlebrush, Callistemon rigidus 'Clemson' is a compact to medium evergreen shrub hung with brilliant red, brush-like flowers that bloom heavily in late spring and often rebloom through summer. Native to Australia, this selection defies expectations for the genus by thriving outdoors in upstate South Carolina, where winters are usually too cold for bottlebrushes.
Callistemon salignus, the willow bottlebrush, is the graceful one, a large shrub or small tree hung with narrow, willow-like leaves and lit each spring by silky new growth of bright pink to copper, the plant's finest moment. The brushes that follow are soft and pale, creamy white to lemon, sometimes flushed pink in selected forms, and the trunk carries a beautiful papery white bark that peels away in thin sheets. Few bottlebrush read as elegant; the willow bottlebrush does.
Among the many bottlebrushes, most of which flower fire-engine red, Callistemon viridiflorus goes a different way, opening in greenish yellow brushes over short, prickly evergreen leaves. Native to Tasmania, this is one of the cold-hardier members of the genus and may hold to zone 7.
Calycanthus floridus 'Athens', also circulated under the name 'Katherine', is a yellow-flowered selection of the Eastern sweetshrub, a deciduous native of the Southeastern woodlands long grown for fragrance, adaptability, and strange, many-tepaled flowers. Where the wild plant blooms a deep maroon, 'Athens' opens soft, buttery yellow, an unexpected and elegant turn on a familiar shrub.
Calycanthus floridus 'Michael Lindsey' is the sweetshrub gardeners reach for when fragrance is the whole point. The species, Carolina allspice, is a southeastern native beloved for reddish-brown flowers that smell of ripe fruit, but the scent varies wildly from seedling to seedling, and 'Michael Lindsey' was chosen precisely for a rich, dependable perfume. Add glossy dark green foliage and clear golden fall color, and this selection has become a benchmark, one the plantsman Michael Dirr called the standard by which other introductions will be measured.
Calycanthus 'Venus' is a white-flowered sweetshrub bred by Dr. Tom Ranney at North Carolina State University, drawing on three species at once: the Eastern Carolina allspice (Calycanthus floridus), the California sweetshrub (Calycanthus occidentalis), and the Chinese sweetshrub (Calycanthus chinensis, long known as Sinocalycanthus). The result is a deciduous shrub that carries the best of all three: hardiness, substance, and an unusual flower.
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.
Two camellias do most of the work in American gardens, Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua, in countless named forms. The Far East holds far more, and Woodlanders is among the few nurseries offering the lesser-known species to gardeners here. Camellia crapnelliana, the Crapnell camellia, is one of the most distinctive: a slow, upright evergreen first described from Hong Kong Island and named for the collector Crapnell.
Most gardeners who grow camellias know two of them. Camellia japonica opens in winter, C. sasanqua in autumn, and between the two a practiced collector can have flowers from October through March. What happens in April is generally someone else's problem.
Camellia euryoides offers a quiet counterpoint to the camellias most familiar to American gardeners. Where Camellia japonica and Camellia sasanqua have long defined the genus in cultivation here, those two represent only a sliver of a far broader Asian lineage. C. euryoides, a shrub or small tree of the subtropical forests of Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangxi, belongs to that richer world of species camellias: subtler, finer in texture, and made for gardeners curious about the genus beyond its showiest forms.
Camellia fraterna is a camellia stripped back to wild beginnings, a species from the hills of eastern China far removed from the big, blowsy blooms of the garden japonicas and sasanquas. Where those carry a few large flowers, this one covers slender, upright branches in a snowfall of small, single, white flowers, faintly pink outside and softly fragrant, that arch the stems with their sheer number. The small, pointed evergreen leaves and open, airy habit give the plant an easy, natural grace.
