I'd grow this plant—and many of its kin too—just for its name alone: Farfugium japonicum. "Far-FOO-gee-um ja-PON-ick-um."


Then again, it has so many startling and hardworking qualities I'd grow it even if it were named Wonderbreadia ohsoblandia. "One-der-BREAD-ee-uh oh-so-BLAND-ee-uh." You would too.

And yes, even though it isn't that hardy North of New York, hence the pot in the picture.  Still, I think you'll still be tempted: Shade tolerant, deer-proof, and fairly evergreen, at least from Washington DC on South: Farfugium would be a fearless groundcover.  (Actually, in a pot it's also a fearless groundcover, defeating even the hateful and intrepid Creeping Woodsorrel, Oxalis corniculata.)



And farfugium's leathery leaves hold up much better over the long hot season than, say, those of hostas.  And did I mention:  Farfugium is deer-proof?  (It shares this with its much hardier cousins, the ligularias.)

I've shown the most widespread form, with gold spots all over the leaves.  (The Latin, aureomaculatum, very helpfully means just that: spotted with gold.)  Many other cultivars are even more exciting not just because they are less popular, but because they are, truly, even more eye-popping.  (And each worthy of a future post, I promise.)

But while there's only one hosta whose flowers are an unalloyed celebration—the (glorious) Easter-lily-flowered plantagineas—all the farfugiums bloom with style and gusto, as well as remarkable timing.



In late October, round heads of buds on leafless stems suddenly poke up through the leaves, long past the time when even asters and mums have become hesitant, and when simple yellow daisies would seem, at first, like confused refugees from your August garden.


Then again, clear yellow goes so naturally with the Fall yellow-orange-red palette of everything else in your garden.  Farfugium flowers pull these unusual perennials into your garden's mainstream, while their unique foliage ensures that they fit in without also fading into the background.



This spotted variety is always the best to start with, because it's also the easiest to carry through the Winter when, like me, you need to keep it in a pot.  Yes, you could bring it into the house, into as cool and sunny a window as you have.  But I let the plants sit outside late enough in the season that their foliage finally gets the idea to die back.  (This can take a while, with some weeks of increasingly implacable freezes; be patient but also vigilant.)  And then I hustle the pots into the basement, where they sit out the Winter dormant and oblivious.

Alternatively, they do fine in an unheated greenhouse.  Either way, it's always a blessing to have something tender that doesn't require scarce and expensive space in a heated greenhouse.

Far as I can tell, farfugiums are terribly well-behaved:  They don't self-seed, they don't spread by runners, and they don't need dividing to keep the clump vigorous but are happy to be split in early Spring if it's your whim.  And don't forget their seriously weed-suppressing prowess.  In all these fine qualities, they go toe-to-toe with hostas.

But then by November, when your hostas have long since gotten tired and then flattened by frost, farfugiums leap into bloom.



And the name! Farfugium: Can you shade garden really do without at least one?

Thorny thrills.  I know: A first this sounds like a lisping double entendre.  But no, truly, this is about thorns that thrill.  No really.



Take a look at the stem in the center, with huge weird half-circle wings topped by sharp central spine—like a silhouette of the Hollywood version of Gengis Kahn's helmet.

This is clearly a thorn-proud rose.  And it also has the prickliest name of any rose: Rosa sericea subspecies omeiensis formae pteracantha.  Literally, the rose that's silky (stems in this case, and not showy enough to worry about), from wherever Mt. Omei is in China, with (pter) winged (acantha) thorns.  Whew:  Rosa pteracantha is just fine for me.

Let's put aside the unknowable practical question here:  Why ever would a rose need such thorns— aren't the regular viciously sharp pointy thorns good enough?  Let alone the unknowable existential question here:  Why ever would a rose want such thorns?

Instead, let's look at the even odder reality: All of the stems in the picture above are from the very same rose bush.  Why does this rose get the Genghis Khan thorns on some stems but the more normally vicious thorns on others?

Another shot, showing just one stem.  The wide thorns are lower down on the stem; after the stem branches out, the thorns become narrow.



Well well:  The wide thorns form when the stem is still young and (clearly) rambunctious.  They are the thorns of a (t)horny youngster.  Later in the growing season, after it's mostly done with growing up (literally), the stem starts to branch out, settle down, and grow boring adult thorns.

No surprise that many gardeners have wondered if there's a way to convince this rose to put more energy into growing the stems with the flashy juvenile thorns.

Is serious Spring pruning the answer?   True, as is usual with plants that tolerate or even welcome such tough love—catalpas, smoke bushes, tulip trees, some elms, paulownias—the resultant growth is even more vigorous than usual.  Leaves are bigger and stems grow much faster as well as farther before branching out.  But the real news is that those same stems also don't flower:  The plant's energy is put into growing fast, lush, and "pre-flowering"—i.e., immature—growth.

And this rose's Genghis Khan thorns also occur only on young and immature growth.  So yes, Spring pruning is indeed the trick to maximize production of the showy juvenile stems, as well as encourage them to stay juvenile longer into the growing season.

For a plant, then, the quest isn't for the Fountain of Youth but for the Hand-tool of Youth: a pair of pruners.  Pruning seems to rejuvenate the plant not just by removing older growth but by resetting the plant's biological clock:  It now thinks it's a kid, and needs to grow accordingly.

It's not at all clear, though, if pruning is truly the miracle cure or not.  Do pruned plants really live longer?  Or do they just look like they're kids again.  My sense is that pruning is basically just plastic surgery: It only makes the plant look younger.   And sometimes its effect is more like that of steroids:  The quick results are thrilling and enormous, but the long-term health may well be degraded.

Even so, I wouldn't grow many of my plants at all if they didn't get pruned.  I wouldn't have the space if they were full-sized, and I also wouldn't get the kind of show from them that I want.  And so I wouldn't have planted them in the first place, and so there would have been fewer of each in the world.  (And a lot less media coverage for them too.)  There are definitely benefits to being pruned, for the plant and for my garden.

Rosa pteracantha's thorns are even more visual than what you've seen so far:  That first season that they're grown, they're not just huge and weird, they're also translucent and red.



If all it takes for this kind of knock-out display is ten minutes with hand pruners each Spring, what rose could resist?  And what gardener?

The last few wild days before the first real frost.  The Fall foliage of all the hardy stuff has revved up even as the tropicals are singing the last chorus of their bodacious Summer strut-and-preen.  Freakishly, gloriously, defiantly, one last collision of color washes over the landscape.



This is a circular bed in Manhattan's Union Square.  In the torrid days of Summer it was "just" a purple-black ode to Morticia Addams, with 'Black Magic' taro encircling a tree-like 'Carmencita' castor bean.  How marvelous that the City gave the horticulturalist a free hand:  This purple-black stunner is the antithesis of the usual municipal mandate of tidy, low, colorful, and floriferous.

This is the end of the park with the most shade, though, so all Summer long this planting was a bit in the dark.  But by Fall the trees had switched their leaves over to chrome before a hard Frost brings down the curtain for everyone: For a week or two, Carmencita and her Black Magic minions finally have the perfect partner.



It's a mild but gusty day, the wind flouncing through Carmencita's heavy foliage to bring out the flashes of blood-red in her young foliage.  You can almost hear her satisfied sighs and giggles.



Hard frost can be slow to arrive right in the "hot-in-the-city" heart of Manhattan: I've had impatiens in bloom well into December.  Warm weather annuals that are tired by October can hang on for six weeks or more, getting rattier day by day.  But there are only so many Fall mums and flowering kales that any of us can stand, let alone plant.  So some of the "Summer" plantings need to keep it up in all through Fall too.

Thank goodness there are dog-days annuals like these two, happy to keep "coming on" even after the swelter that they crave has tailed off.  No matter that it can't get too hot for them in August, they aren't such hi-temp ninnies that they collapse the first night in November that it dips into the 30's.

Where in my garden can I plan out just such a Fall foliage collision?  No wait: I already have!  Tomorrow's post, I promise.