Woodlanders

Woodlanders is a mail-order purveyor of rare plants sourced from down the street and across the world.

06/08/2026

April took us to Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Botanical Garden, where the hosts welcomed us like we’d been there a hundred times. Easy to understand why. Our own Megan spent years on these grounds before she found her way to Woodlanders, and watching her move through paths she once tended was its own small joy.

The native-focused garden designs, though. That’s what I keep coming back to. All that texture and abundance, plants leaning into one another the way they would in the wild, nothing overworked.

06/07/2026

Rhododendron prunifolium, the plumleaf azalea, is meant to be the closing act. The one that holds out through the worst of July and August, blooming when every other azalea has long since called it a season. ‘July Jester’ apparently never read the script. Here they are in early June, open weeks ahead of their own reputation.

It tracks, somehow, for a plant from almost nowhere: a scattering of shaded ravines along the Georgia-Alabama line, where they remain the rarest azalea in the eastern states. Funnel-shaped, orange warming to red, the stamens thrown out long and loose. A jester jumping the cue, which is about the most fitting thing this one could do.

Up close, a single bloom is a modest thing. The reputation standing behind it is anything but.

06/06/2026

Have you seen a bottlebrush before? Not really seen one. I mean caught it in the moment it goes off.

Callistemon. The name is Greek for “beautiful stamen,” and that’s the whole trick. Those red brushes aren’t petals at all. They’re stamens, hundreds of them, fired out along the stem in perfect radial order.

Then watch what the branch does. It grows right through the middle of the flower and keeps going, out the far end into new leaves, like the bloom was just a stop along the way. Crush a leaf and you get citrus. Look close and last year’s seed capsules are still clinging to the wood, waiting on fire to open.

Pure form. No fuss.

06/05/2026

Turn over a leaf of the Alabama croton and the back of it is metallic silver. Not pale, not dusty. Silver, scaled and bright, flashing every time the wind moves through.

A state geologist found them in 1877 on a dry bluff above the Cahaba River, and it took the best botanists in the South to put a name to the thing: Croton alabamensis. Still native to just a few counties of central Alabama, and grown by almost no one. Crush a leaf and it smells faintly of apple, which is more than most shrubs will do for you.

We caught this stand at the JC Raulston Arboretum, where Jonas was taking cuttings, the slow way you keep something rare from slipping off the map. Green overhead, silver beneath, copper by November. Some plants you grow for a season. This one you keep.

Currently in our prop house with hopes to add this to the 2027 catalog 💚

⸻

06/04/2026

The old nursery site is carpeted in Mimosa strigillosa right now, pink powderpuffs scattered low across the ground like someone spilled them there.

Sunshine mimosa, the natives call it. They run flat and wide, fix their own nitrogen, shrug off drought, and fold their leaves up shy if you touch them. A groundcover that asks for nothing and blooms like this anyway. The old site has gone and made itself beautiful without us.

06/02/2026

The Empress of China is blooming beside the nursery, and she is not being subtle about it.

She’s a Chinese dogwood, Cornus kousa, but not just any one. John Elsley, the English plantsman who spent decades in the South Carolina trade, looked at a great many kousa dogwoods in his life and stopped at this one. When someone who has seen everything stops, you tend to stop too.

You can see why. Hundreds of creamy bracts, four to a bloom, held flat to the light until the whole canopy goes white at once. People slow their cars down without quite knowing why.

She’s holding court now. We’d hate for you to miss her.

woodlanders

05/29/2026

CANCELED: Spring Sale on SAT May 30th
Due to inclement weather forecasted for Saturday, May 30th, the final Woodlanders spring sale has been canceled.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. Woodlanders sales will return in fall!

Until then, pick up for local orders is always available.

05/28/2026

The tree the mastodons left behind.

Maclura pomifera — Osage orange — is one of the oddest stories in North American botany. Her fruit looks like a green brain and smells faintly of citrus. Nothing much eats it now, because the animals that probably did have been gone for ten thousand years. She’s a tree still waiting for a ride that isn’t coming back.

The Osage Nation made the finest bows on the continent from her wood, traded a thousand miles from where she grew. Settlers planted her by the millions as living fence before barbed wire — “horse high, bull strong, and pig tight.” Drought, ice, poor soil, deer: she shrugs at all of it. Three hundred years if you let her.

This specimen lives along the Aiken citywide arboretum trail. Scan the sign next time you walk past.

🌳 Maclura pomifera
📍 Aiken, SC

05/23/2026

Reasons to grow citrus in zone 7: you can. That’s it. That’s the reason.
Changsha mandarin, yuzu, Ichang papeda, flying dragon. Cold-hardy citrus, fruiting outdoors in the upper South, no greenhouse required.
Catalog link in bio.

Address

925 Park Avenue SE
Aiken, SC
29801

Website

http://woodlanders.net/

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