'Open Hearth' daylily is the first of my "Bodacious" series, not least because you can see it from anywhere.
Like fifty feet away, from down the narrow-grass "runway".
It says "Stop here! Look right, look left!"
Or through the sky-high Summer perennial show of the Winter Garden.

A 'Silver Umbrellas' aralia tries, without success I'm proud to say, to cool things down.

Having a Red Garden is a great excuse to collect the daylilies that would make even Dolly Parton blush: Gigantic flowers—five or six inches is waaaay puny: I'm talking 8, 10, 11 inches here. Flagrantly juvenile color combinations too, with yellow AND orange AND red all seeing who can shout the loudest. Shade your eyes: Here's the smallest and most tasteful of the bunch, 'Open Hearth.'

The flowers are about six inches, on shortish stems so numerous that on some mornings the whole airspace above the foliage is solid blossom. And like all daylilies, thankfully, Open Hearth isn't dampened one bit by my high water table, let alone a winter-flooded front-of-the-bed location.
As Dolly would exclaim."Whoo-EEE!"  This is one powerfully- proud perennial.

The giant woolly morning-glory has gotten its bearings. I don't set out plants of this immense annual until the weather is truly warm and steady in June, but even so by early August they have climbed the twenty feet of my giant tripod.
It doesn’t bloom until its second year—which means that it doesn’t bloom at all for me here in New England. So it’s all about the ascent, the getting up there, the climb. Which for a morning glory means a twine.  Around and around, in a snake-spiral from bottom to top.

I plant four pots of Giant Woolly in the huge terra-cotta. So I have eight plants total: they come two in a pot. Stay tuned for why, but it’s a statistically-significant group. Their first goal is to find something to climb on. The young vines grow so quickly that they were already nearly a yard tall when I bought them. And they are so thick-stemmed even as youngsters that they completely ignore the string or the pea stake a “normal” morning glory would wrap itself around by tomorrow. Giant Woolly’s are holding out for bigger prey—taller prey actually—and that means thicker prey. The twenty-foot lengths of galvanized pipe that form the tripod are evidently to their liking—they race right up it in about six weeks. But it takes a few days to, so to speak, lead the horse to water. Vines have a sense of touch: They can feel when they are in contact with a likely support, and they seal the deal by spiraling themselves around and around it. On the way up, they feel every inch. All of that waving-around-in-the-breeze stuff, trying this direction then that, disappears after the host is detected and then selected. The tip of the vine now noses right around and around and around the host—in this case the galvanized pipe—with python affection. (Twiners characteristically twine in a spiral that's a bit smaller than the diameter of the host, ensuring a tight fit and minimal slippage.)
But Giant Woolly's are a bit slow on the uptake, so to speak. It isn’t enough for young vine to brush up against or even lean on the pipe at a spot midway down the stem. The sense of touch seems to localize much more toward the tip. So I tie each stem to the pipe loosely with twine every foot or so, right up to the fragile tip.
The tip of this one, which was held closely to the pipe then, has grown six inches more since, and is gratefully hugging the pipe. It was time to set this vine free.
But how do the tips know which way to go? What is it about that steady contact, in this case with the pipe, that helps them "decide"? Does that period of steady contact let the tips, who knows?, take readings from the stars? Track the sun's East-to-West path across the sky for a few days? Sense the lines of magnetic force heading up to the poles? Or is it because the biggest spiral of all—DNA—is, oh yes, all counterclockwise spirals too? However they do it, they determine right from left. Truly: right from left. And then they begin to twine as fast as the available heat and sun and water will allow, and only to the right. (Well, upwards and to the right. But never up and to the left.)
Self-clinging vines, ivy, say, don’t need to know their right from their left. They only need to know up. And then they grow up. Straight up. (They need to know front from back, though, growing their hold-fast roots only out of the front side, the belly of the stem that’s right against the wall or the tree or the house.) Twining vines need to be smarter. It would waste time to switch from clockwise to counterclockwise, to grow right-to-left one week, then left-to-right the next. And besides, maybe in the switchover you’d lose hold—lose your twine, so to speak.
Do other twining vines all grow counterclockwise? Are there vines that are ambidextrous, one plant choosing clockwise, one choosing counterclockwise? What a big life choice: This way? That way? It would be like coming out, and just as full of agony and honesty: I’m clockwise, world, and there’s nothing I can do about it but be proud and happy.
Or is it a North / South Hemisphere thing, like water down the drain: One direction in New York, the opposite in Rio? (Damn, the one time I was in South America, did I think to look? Nope, says The Washington Post: Most vines twine counterclockwise, as indeed do my Giant Woolly's. I have a variety of twiners (you’re not surprised, I hope, on any level?) Honeysuckles, hops, wisterias. I’ll survey the troops and report back.

Today, at last and finally, I am unimpeachably sophisticated: My deinanthe is in bloom.

And deinanthes are the ne plus ultra of cool.
First, they are hydrangea cousins, and in the hierarchy of garden taste hydrangea cousins are far more important than hydrangeas themselves, whose ease of cultivation, availability, and—perhaps worst of all—unashamedly big and noticeable flowers mark them as likely favorites of children, neophytes, and peasants everywhere. Which they are. (Nonetheless I plant a lot of hydrangeas in my own gardens and my clients'; we'll get to The Unforgiveables in another post.)
As I say, though, the blooms of hydrangea cousins are generally more subtle then, uh, garden-variety hydrangeas, so they are more boring for children, neophytes, peasants and not a few clients. And so they are the province of fellow plant geeks, who are at pains never to be mistaken for any of those other folks.
Deinanthe, then, is the perfect taste marker, the perfect gauntlet thrown casually to the ground. And so beware, Philistines: You are now in the presence of a subtle aesthetic. Not only is deinanthe a hydrangea cousin, it's an herbaceous one. (Bush hydrangeas? So common, so, well, bushy.) And it's native to Japan. (Native plants? Such a convenient bandwagon for xenophobes and the timidly political-correct.) It requires part-shade and good moisture. (Full sun? So blatant. Self-reliance and drought-resistance? For those who are serious enough to make the commitment for regular care.) And best of all, almost: The flowers don't even face up.
They droop more reticently than a perfect Victorian child that looks shyly to the ground, one immaculate finger touched to the cheek. Flowers you can actually see without stooping and gently tipping one face-up, like Cary Grant putting his finger under Tippi Hedren's chin so he can look her in the eyes?
The effrontery, the moral laxity. Flowers should dip respectfully until summoned.
And now best of all: The flowers are sort-of-blue. Not a deep blue. (Too obvious.) A pale pearly blue, shading lighter here and, a bit, darker there.
Oh yes: The foliage. Large-ish and (now that you think of it) hydrangea-like indeed, although instead of the one point at the end, there are two. But just a mid-green, in truth. And not large enough to be make a name as one of the cherished Big Foliage perennials (which we'll get too in time) that sophisticates also cleave too. (In the case of dienanthe: Big Foliage? So simplistic, so at-a-glance. In the case of the other Big Foliage: So NOT the ferns and ferny wannabes that people who aren't yet secure in their Ultimate Taste yearn for to assure everyone that they are, in fact, Tasteful.)
And I forgot: The name. Deinanthe caerulea. First word first, pronounced "die-NAN-thee". Uncommon indeed, not one of the usual suspects, English, French, Italian, or German. Not even Latin. Tut tut, children: It's Greek, and it means (somehow) that the flowers are unusually large. Well bully for that. Some of us knew it was Greek from the sounds alone, because we have that worldly-wise ear for foreign languages even though, like EF Benson's Lucia, we usually can't manage more than a phrase or three in any of them. No matter: We just know, and that's what counts. And the second name doesn't let us down either: Caerulea; pronounced "suh-RULE-ee-uh", and referring (of course) to the complex and literate "caerulean" blue. Not sky blue, not robin's egg, not sea-blue, not even delphinium blue. Not, in fact, any kind of blue you could identify with a simple word in English. Ah, caerulean blue. It's Latin of course. Even the repetition of "oo"—"suh-ROO-lee-un BLOO"—so satisfying in a pursed-lip, not-smiling way. There you have it: Rarity, tempermentalness, subtlety, difficult (for some) to pronounce: Deinanthe caerulea is an orgy of discretion, a multi-lingual profusion of exclusionary detail. Heaven!

I'm the guy who paid $80 apiece for a pair of Hemerocallis 'Red Suspenders', which is a red/yellow bicolored daylily with eleven-inch flowers.
You read right: Eleven inches. (I paid $80 apiece for two of anything named 'Red Suspenders'.) So I can't be criticized as being one of those garden sophisticates for whom Flowers are a bad F-word, but Foliage and Form are good.
And good they are, filling out and brightening up the garden so flowers don't have to do all the work. Here's a dwarf Japanese maple, Acer palmatum 'Red Pygmy'.
Ferny foliage that says purple all season, and a low and starting-to-worry-me-it's-getting-so-wide habit. Fine and dandy in itself. But then with the variegated gooseneck, Lysimachia 'Geisha' pushing up at the front edges?
The yellow and green leaves are humming a jazzy but harmonious tune indeed atop the foreground of the Red Pygmy's tasteful dark ostinato of "ferny-purple-low, ferny-purple-low".
And Geisha has the typical gooseneck flowers, whose nodding soft-white cones are an echo to Red Pygmy's nodding ferny-purple-lowness. Vertical spikes of flowers would be too disruptive.
All in all, a lot going on, all of it riffing together. This plant combination has rhythm as well as harmony, self-evidence as well as second-glance subtlety. Yum!

Mulleins are equal-opportunity flowers. They'd take on a rocky roadside as easily as a sand dune, a meadow, or a proper garden bed. And no wonder: Huge heavy (and sometimes fantastically silvery) felted leaves in a basal clump that smothers anything nearby. And also act just like mulch, keeping the surrounding soil cooler at the same time they conserve water by cutting down surface evaporation.

The thick felt helps the leaves themselves reduce evaporation too, while, handily, also helping keep them unpalatable for animals.
And the central bamboo-cane-thick stem thrusts head-high-in-the-sky a titanic candelabra of flowers, ensuring that pollinators—deliriously dedicated bees chiefly—can see the plant from anywhere. And also locate sister plants near and far to complete the pollination.


(Who-Knew? Moment: The bees aren't intentionally pollinating anything. Unalloyed altruism isn't part of any animal's DNA. Instead, the bees are focussed on foraging, getting pollen for the hive. When they find a good source—in this case, one of those verbascum blossoms—they make the cost-effective choice to move right over to the next verbascum blossom, and the next and the next, whether on this plant or that one a half-mile away. In other words, they exhaust one pollen source before going to the trouble of sussing out anew one. That thoroughness is why pollination takes place at all: When the bee's loaded up with pollen, she's also dusted over with the excess that, in the frenzy, didn't make it into her pollen sacks. That excess is what gets brushed off onto—i.e., that pollinates— the next flower of the same exact variety, not some random nearby flower of who-knows-what kind, where the pollen couldn't pollinate at all.  The bee doesn't have a clue and couldn't care less even so: it's all about getting more and more of that sure thing, that particular kind of pollen, first.)



I've long enjoyed the height, enthusiasm, and color of Verbascum thapsiforme.
Up to nine feet tall, in bloom for months, and with large flowers too.



And so, like a bee, when it comes to me and verbascums, More Is More too. More mulleins, in kind and in quantity both.



Here's an unusual tiny-flowered, but full-sized variety at Chanticleer. Wow what a staggeringly-good place.
The same impressive and smothering clump of large leaves...

...leading up to the same massive candelabra of untold hundreds of yellow flowers that perform, at least as an entire troop, for three months and more.

But the flowers are teensy, a quarter the size of mine.
See how much bigger (comparatively) the flowers of V. thapsiforme are?
Smaller isn't lesser. Smaller is fabulous! In the garden as in life, variety itself is valuable, regardless of the direction.



If the original is shorter, then taller is of interest (or shorter still). If the flowers are deep yellow, then please bring on pale yellow. If the leaves are green, then let's have them in purple or yellow or striped with white. If they are smooth, make them felted. If they are oval, turn them into ferny fingers. And if the flowers are large (well, -ish), then let's oooh and aaah over them when they are tiny instead.



And ooof and aaah I did.



Oo yes: and if the plant is available at Home Depot (or just growing there right by the road, where you can dig up a young rosette in early Spring for free), make the new variety scarce and expensive: I'll only want it more.



This mullein trumps all those aces, though: Even Chanticleer doesn't know the identity or where they got it. Either I'll need to make good friends so they'll let me harvest some seeds (not impossible) or I'll Google away in hopes of identifying the species as well as the source.
It sure looks like Verbascum olympicum...
...whose flowers are noticeably smaller than my thapsiforme's. (Thank you Hidden Hollow Farm for the picture.) But Chanticleer would have known this identify right off the bat. Mysterious indeed.

All tactics, please, to identify and the source Chanticleer's Mystery Mullein. Gotta have it!

If Giacometti had designed perennials instead of sculpture,
this would be one of his greatest:
Asian burnet is so distinctive, to elongatedly elegant, that I have it right by the path to my back door: It's a star, worthy of such prime real estate. Strong straight-arrow, nearly leafless flower stems shoot up almost five feet.
They filigree the foreground, so are the perfect front detail to embellish long-distance views.
The leaves themselves are almost all at the base, and they are a narrow ferny bunch. (The latin is Sanguisorba tenuifolia, where tenuifolia means, literally, "narrow leaves". Think "tenui" like "tenuous" or "attenuated": all mean, one way or another, narrow, thin, stretched.)

The quirky pendant bottle-brush flowers are the Dr. Seuss touch.
Intriguing and even comical, they are the dancing levity atop all this startlingly-severe and anorexic geometry.
Normally in burgundy, pink, or red, this white-flowered form keeps elegance at least in coloring if not in habit. As with all the burnets, tangential pollinators like flies and small wasps are the chosen few, not the usual mainstream bees. Even here, then, the perennial is proud in its iconoclasm.

So there I was earlier this week, on the way to see a client in Wellesley, MA, and I passed this huge colorful streetside show:

Trees with colorful flowers? Think about it: How many of them bloom early in the Spring? All those pink cherries. Those pink or yellow magnolias. Rosy-pink "redbuds"? Those lavender paulownias?


And then, the dogwoods come out, and so all the trees thereafter have white flowers only? Stewartia, catalpa, fringe tree, franklinia. Think about it: A tree that blooms later than May and doesn't have white flowers?


Only two, I think: Mimosa (pink blossoms, ugh) and the other one here on that Wellesley streetscape: Goldenrain tree.  Ugh, what a sticky-sweet name, and way too similar to yet another early-Spring yellow-flowered tree (Golden-chain tree, laburnum) plus a climbing rose (Golden Showers).


Let's flip over into the Latin:Kohlreuteria paniculata. Thank you, Mr. Kohlreuter whoever you were. "Paniculata" means that it has big panicles of flowers. Does it ever:

I had never gotten this close to the flowers before—get a load of my grimy man-of-the-earth fingernail!—so I was surprised to see the orange-red flare at the base of the petals.  The pollen is orange-red too—nice coordination!—and the petals are folded back to expose it completely.


Kohlreuterias in my experience are fool-proof as long as they're planted up a slope, even a tiny one.  They lose their confidence if surface water doesn't drain right away.
Sun and heat are welcome, and the trees are drought-proof too.   So tough they can be used as street trees.


We'll take another look at kohreuterias later in the season: As if these unique flowers weren't enough, they mature to colorful inflated pods by August.


In the Fall we'll confirm if the tree gets good Fall foliage.  The branching and bark are very satisfying in the Winter too.  A four-season tree then?  Very possible, and very essential anywhere (Zone 5 - 9) it's hardy.

It's bee-balm season, finally. I say "finally" because I only (at the moment) have one bee-balm, Jacob Cline, and it's the early star of my Red Garden.
(OK, more honestly, the Red Garden isn't very red, at least broadly, until August, when the dahlias and the trumpet vines really get going. I'm working on this, trust me. Bee-balm, late in June, is the "early" indicator that this is, in fact a "red" garden.)
Jacob Cline is the best bee-balm to start with, because unlike so many of the tribe, it never, never, never gets powdery mildew. How's this for a disgusting Wiki-image of P-M on a gourd leaf? Powdery, slippery, slippery in the rainy: When a plant has powdery mildew, it's Pretty Much Slimed-up.
Yuck. Even "mildew-resistant" bee-balms can get PMS: They ain't mildew-proof. But Jacob Cline? Even though I do nothing to prepare for or fight off PMS—no thinning out of the stems to increase air flow, no spraying of anything to kill of an early outbreak, no extra watering in case there's a drought and the famously water-friendly bee-balm would become stressed and therefore more mildew-susceptible—Jacob is free and clear the entire season. So, I say: Grow this bee-balm! Then there won't be any PMS in your Red Garden either. Jacob Cline lets you enjoy what you're supposed to about bee-balms: the long long season of perky big-impact flowers.
My colony has started into bloom just this week, so the display is still young. But it's intense anyway. No staking, no pinching, no dead-heading either. No nothing, just week after week after week of eager cooperative bloom, and month after month of disease-free (but, true, like all bee-balms, boring) green foliage beneath.
The other thrill of bee-balm can be, if you're of the thinking sort, inferred right from the flowers.

Can you see that the perky "You called, boss? Anything I can do for you sir?" flower clusters are made up of individual prong-shaped flowers, one prong up, one prong down? A bit closer look, and with better light to show you how red Jacob really is:

Each flower is like a narrow jaw flung wide open, with the black nostrils (the pollen actually) at the top, and the deep deep throat opened up in the center.
So: Red flowers in warm weather. Red flowers that are deep and tubular (work with me here: throaty is "tubular"). Yup: Bee-balm should really be called Hummer-heaven: the little guys just go wild for it.
Bullet-proof culture, six week, or is it two months or more? of great flowers, guaranteed visits by hummingbirds: Jacob Cline is a Summer star.

The lively chess-piece from Alice in Wonderland?

The intentionally not-lively Victorian monarch?
The too-lively and so now-dead drag star?

Of course not. We're dealing with classics in this blog, not these human ephemerals. I mean, therefore, the 'White Queen' crinum lily. It's a hybrid, one of Luther Burbank's lovliest. Crinums are the hostas of Florida; no thrill in having another one anywhere down there. But in New England, a crinum growing in-ground is a shock. A pleasant shock, a frisson, but a shock even so.
I'm not ready to risk my pair of White Queens, nicely in bud in the beds on either side of the pathway out from the back door into the garden. So my Queens are in five-gallon nursery pots sunk into the soil just for the Summer.

Here's what those impressive buds become: swooning pendant white bells. Royalty indeed.
You can get yours where I got this picture: PlantDelights.com.
As you'd conclude from their popularity in Florida, crinums love stinking Summer swelter, and don't much care about what soil they grow in as long as it's well-drained. I keep most of mine in pots year-round, and they hang out in a cool greenhouse (50 degrees tops at night) from October through May. Some crinums are hardy in-ground, easy as pie, up into Virginia. And with a little more work, some are even hardy up here in Rhode Island. Stay tuned for those posts.