Aiken, South Carolina — Est. 1979
One of America’s oldest rare plant nurseries. Still growing, still hunting.
Woodlanders has been finding, propagating, and shipping rare plants from Aiken, South Carolina since 1979. We began with native plants most nurseries had never heard of. Over 46 years, we have introduced more than 2,200 plant varieties into cultivation — and we are not finished.
Years in operation
Varieties introduced
Species in current catalog
How it started
A short history of a nursery built on the conviction that the rarest plants are worth growing — and that the South’s botanical diversity was being quietly ignored.
The Mackintoshes arrive in Aiken
Robert and Julia Mackintosh left the island of Grenada in the West Indies and settled in Aiken, South Carolina. Trained in architecture and biology, they discovered a state with extraordinary botanical diversity and almost no one cultivating it. They decided to do something about that.
The first plant list
By spring of 1980 they had a small list of plants for sale and a mailing list drawn from the membership of the North Carolina Wildflower Preservation Society. South Carolina had no such group. That detail says something about both the moment and the ambition.
BobMcCartney and George Mitchell join
The trail to Bob McCartney led to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, where for over a decade he had been propagating seldom-cultivated native species for one of the most significant landscapes in the country. George Mitchell, a native of Grenada, joined the same year — bringing knowledge of tropical and subtropical plants that expanded Woodlanders’ range beyond what a purely temperate focus would have allowed. Both are still here.
An internationally known source
Woodlanders grew into an internationally recognized nursery carrying over 1,000 rare and hard-to-find plants. While other institutions focused on new introductions for colder climates, Woodlanders identified a gap: the Deep South was being underserved. They addressed it by sourcing from plant hunting expeditions, arboreta, and botanical gardens around the world.
The Mackintoshes
Julia died in August of 2013 and Robert in February of 2016. The nursery they built from a small plant list and a borrowed mailing list had by then introduced over 2,200 varieties into cultivation. That is a particular kind of legacy.
The people behind the plants
Woodlanders is a small operation run by people who take this work seriously. Between them, the team carries over a century of combined horticultural knowledge.
owner
Fiona von Grey
Fiona grew up between worlds — an entrepreneurial family, time in southern India during her early teenage years, and an encounter with Ayurvedic medicine that turned her attention permanently toward plants. She studied medical botany at Emory University, which gave that interest a scientific vocabulary to go alongside the intuitive one. When she found Woodlanders, she found a nursery already organized around the same conviction: that the rarest plants carry stories worth telling, and that growing them well is also a form of preservation. She has been running Woodlanders since 2024.
HEAD NURSERY MANAGER
George Mitchell
George has been propagating plants at Woodlanders since 1982 — longer than most nurseries of any kind have existed. A native of Grenada, his knowledge of tropical and subtropical plants expanded Woodlanders’ range from the start. The rarest things in the catalog have usually passed through his hands.
HORTICULTURIST
Bob McCartney
Bob came to Woodlanders by way of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, where he spent over a decade collecting and propagating seldom-cultivated native species. His knowledge of southern native plants runs deep enough to be genuinely humbling. His humor is a reasonable substitute for a benefits package.
Megan Christine
Megan Christine came to Woodlanders through wildlife ecology at NC State University, where Southeastern flora eventually overtook everything else she was supposed to be studying. Her background gives her an understanding of plants in ecological context — not just what they are, but what they support and what depends on them. Day to day she keeps much of the nursery running, and is often the first person visitors meet when they come for an appointment or an open house — which means she's also, frequently, the reason they leave with more plants than they planned on.
Jonas Meyer
Jonas Meyer grew up hunting and fishing the Ogeechee River outside Harlem, Georgia — a childhood that gave him an early, unhurried fluency with the natural world. He studied Environmental Horticulture in Augusta, spent a season as an au pair in rural France, and somewhere along the way developed a fixation on the flora of the Southeast that has led him to expand documented range records for native species in corners of Georgia that most botanists haven't thought to look. He gardens the way his grandparents taught him — patiently, and close to the ground — and tends an orchid collection at home that suggests his attention to rare things doesn't stop at the nursery gate.
What guides the work
The same convictions that shaped Woodlanders in 1979 still shape it now. They have gotten more specific over time, but not more complicated.
Stewards of Stories
Every plant in this catalog has a rovenance — a place it came from, a person who first recognized its value, a history that stretches back further than most nurseries have existed. We consider it our responsibility to know that story and carry it forward.
Conscious Providers
We grow what we sell. That means we know exactly how it was grown — in our propagation house, in our fields, in Aiken. We are continuously improving our practices because the plants we grow are worth that level of attention.
Horticultural Students
After 46 years, the catalog is larger and the questions are more interesting — not fewer. We remain students of this work: of the plants, the ecology, the history, and the craft of growing things well enough to send them safely to someone else’s garden.
The nursery in Aiken
Our nursery occupies nearly 20,000 square feet of growing space in Aiken, South Carolina — across the street from the Aiken Farmers Market and surrounded by trees that Woodlanders planted over the past four decades. The oldest of them are beginning to look like the landscape had always intended them to be there.
We are a mail-order nursery. Almost everything we grow ships nationally. We occasionally open to visitors — dates are posted to Instagram and The Node when they arise
Note: We do not have regular retail hours. Please check Instagram or contact us before planning a visit.
For botanical gardens, arboretums, andlandscape professionals
Woodlanders supplies institutional buyers across the country — botanical gardens, public arboretums, and landscape designers working at a scale that demands provenance, rarity, and plants with genuine botanical significance. If you are sourcing for an institution or a significant planting project, we would like to hear from you.