Plants that do something fantastic one season, something else the next—and the next and the next?  That don't look fantastic for two weeks and then boring for fifty.  That don't sing just that one song in May and then look exhausted until next May.  That do a recital, song after song, over the entire year?


These tireless and versatile performance are the automatic stars of your garden.  And if you're are lucky as well as wise, their recital is in concert with the rest of your garden too.

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This is the October solo of a tree and my dear neighbor—the same one who got me into troughs. Her garden full of multi-talented horticulture.  This is her Seven Son tree (Heptacodium miconioides).

The deep ruddy-red/pink display looks just like flowers, but those (profuse, fragrant, small, white) were on the program for August.

These are "just" the wrapping paper for those flowers buds, but what a lovely gift they are in themselves:  Countless quintets of straight narrow pink lobes that make each little conical star a burst of pure enthusiasm.  Each is a semaphore of "Hi!  We're so glad to be here!  What a day!  Thanks for coming right over to take a closer look."


And so yes indeed, let's do get a bit closer.  (Can you spot the ladybug?)


It's a unique late-season display, especially up North; it's telling that the common name here is Hardy Crepe Myrtle: There isn't anything hardy to compare it with.


(BTW, no idea on the "Seven Son" name.  There are five lobes in the calyx.  Maybe seven petals in the white flowers?  I'll check this out next August.  And the Latin, Heptacodium, only taunts further:  Seven "codiums"?  Google "codium" and you find that it's a species of sea weed.  Help!)

Heptacodium is a small tree more than than a bush.  Here's the one at the sensational Mt. Auburn Cemetery up in Cambridge, MA.  Twenty feet at least.


Heptacodium is easy as well as available: Just full sun and any soil that isn't soggy all Winter.  Because it's so fast-growing, and the flowers are at the tips of the growth it's been working on just that season—like PG hydrangeas, say—I'm hoping to grow some as single-trunk pollards.  Then they'll still fit into my tightly-choreographed beds.  My full fantasy is to have six of them—a sextet of Seven Sons, a hepta-sextet—in the vast Yellow Borders that will someday come into being in the entire back half acre of my property.

But a pink-friendly plant in the Yellow Borders?  Why not in the Pink Borders?  Fair enough, but I'll be growing these for the August display of white flowers, when the Yellow Borders will be at their best.  By October I'll be relaxed enough to welcome their ruddy-pink number too.  And their pink will go with the inevitable October pink of the huge PG hydrangeas around the reflecting pool, who have the same showy white display in August.  And besides, the Pink Borders are finally getting full enough that I'm feeling that I don't automatically have to exile to them every darned thing that has even a whiff of pink.

In the coming year I'll focus on heptacodium's other seasonal solos: the bark, the foliage, the flowers, the Fall foliage.  And if the economy finally comes back, maybe I'll be planting my Seven Son Sextet next.

What a thrill to have a patch of Crocosmia aurea bloom its very first year in the ground.  But the excitement didn't stop then.

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Just in time to be improvising with 'Purple Haze' aster at the back, 'Indigo Spires' salvia at the front, and the purple-blushed leaves of 'Sparking Burgundy' eucomis to the left:  Those sprays of big, bright star-shaped crocosmia flowers have matured into concentrated sprays of pointy orange seed heads.


All the flower stems stay fresh green, for an added contrast.


Yes, the seed display is of smaller dimension than the flower display.  But quality isn't about size.  And what if the asters and the salvia and the crocosmia had all been in bloom together:  It would have looked like one of those "Foolproof Flower Garden, All For $19.95 If Your Order TODAY!" frauds in the Sunday supplements.

Better not to have too much of any one good thing—in this case, flowers—at a time.  When it was in bloom in September, the crocosmia was a star.   And so it had the stage to itself.  Now it's the aster and the salvia's time, and the crocosmia has very kindly morphed into a stylish, discrete, and sympathetic ornament.  It brings sparkle to the ensemble but doesn't hog the spotlight.

Wisteria pods?  Velvety, a bit mysterious.  But quite approachable, even dissectable.  And only mildly interested in producing actual seeds.

Trumpet-vine pods?  Giant head-bonkers in waiting.  Scimitars at the ready.

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Regardless, Trumpet Vine pods are so impressive in size and profusion that I welcome them.  They're the What's Next? on two of my pergolas after their hot-weather, hot-orange trumpet flowers are through sometime in August.


I also like their new "message": The display that in July started out floral has by September finished up vegetable.


Look at all of those pods, just brimming with..well what, exactly?  Big seeds—beans, really—like wisteria?  Or an orderly row of peas?


Only one way to know for sure: cut one off and open it up.


The knife is scarcely needed: The pod splits right open to reveal, not beans nor peas at all...


...but hundreds of paper-thin seeds on translucent wings that any breeze could carry to the next acre. 

They were in tightly stacked layers, like money in a wallet.

That vegetable-looking pod was certainly a false promise.

But since the pods are so fecund, so stuffed with seeds, why don't I have trumpet vine seedlings by the thousands?  Why isn't trumpet vine as big a self-seeding terror as bittersweet or kudzu?

Indeed, even if everyone moans about trumpet-vine's underground runners, no one moans about trumpet-vine's seedlings.  What a relief, but also how sad: The vine is spectacularly successful in seed production, but either they aren't hardy or they aren't fertile.  Wisteria doesn't (in my experience) self-seed either—although its far-ranging runners out-run any of trumpet vine's by many yards—but at least it isn't knocking itself out producing thousands of seeds in the first place.

Now's the time to take a look at all the labels.  They're my only hope of keeping track of the crates of dahlias, cannas, and who-knows-what-else that will soon stack floor-to-ceiling in the basement.

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In the crate, the tuber of one dahlia (or canna or elephant ear or eucomis or four o'clock or glad or?) looks pretty much like the next.  The only way I'll be able to know next Spring what to plant in the Red Garden not the Pink Garden is to have a label handy now when I dig everything up in the Fall.

How many kinds of plants to you have in your gardens?  I've got hundreds, so I keep track of them with a huge spread-sheet.  The pile of labels in the picture above are the ones that I think are actually growing out there in the gardens this year.



And this pile is for the plants and tubers that didn't make it through to Spring this year, or that I decided weren't worth it even so.


Looking through the labels is looking through some of the history of the garden. Canna 'Tropicana'? It was a shrimp no matter how much sun, how good the soil. All my skimpy tubers will fit in one crate, so I only need the one label.  Dahlia 'Emory Paul'? None of the promised fifteen-inch monster pink flowers for me.

I'll grow other dahlias, other cannas.  (Goodness knows there are hundreds more to try.)  But it's not as if I'm, well, under-stocked.

Here are the labels for the cannas that are thriving this year.  All seventeen of them.

Seventeen?  Seventeen cannas?  Even so, the garden hardly looks like Canna Central.  (Or maybe a lot of cannas are essential if you want a satisfying warm-weather garden.  Or maybe I just think so.)  And there are four or five cannas that I want to add in 2011.

And just fifteen dahlias?

Actually, just fifteen that I can identify.

Here are six more—cast offs from clients—that deserve another year.

I can't just put on a label "Cool Bicolor" or "Wow What an Apricot".  Time to join a dahlia society.  (And if YOU can identify any of them, thanks for letting me know.)

Only four eucomis?  Surely there's another to try in 2011.


The labels are just the white plastic-&-wire tags for Invisible Fence jobs; you can get them in bundles at Home Depot. Cheap—I think they are in bundles of 25, or is it 50?  And they last for years. I write on them with a Sharpie.

I can write over a label several times over the years—and don't forget, the PetSafe side is usable too.  So each label becomes a tiny palimpsest of garden history.  That "Yellow" dahlia?  Gone, and its label is now Euomis pole-evansii.  POLE EVANSII, so I can really read it next Spring.

Every time I visit the 6BC.org botanical garden in Manhattan, I gnash my teeth that I still don't have this sensational broad-leaved evergreen vine in my own garden.

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Yes, ivy (also seen here to perfection) is the universal first choice for broad-leaved evergreen vines. And no wonder, given that it's much hardier as well as cheaper.

The other universal is Armand's clematis, and it's a stunner only in part because of its rarity this far North. Even where everyone already grows it—from Zone 7 south—it's still a favorite with casual gardeners, just folks, and cognoscenti alike.

For once, the Latin name couldn't be more literal.  Armand's clematis is—tada!—Clematis armandii. This is the only plant I know of in Manhattan. Which could mean that this is the only one in Manhattan. Which could mean that this is the most Northerly one on the East Coast. (Does anyone know of —or have— Clematis armandii in a garden further North than Manhattan? Wow would I love to know.)

Like all clematis, Armand's flowers are seriously showy.

They open in early Spring, and are just like those of the ever-present autumn clematis, both in quantity and size.


I last visited this vine in early Spring, just after the bloom peak.  No matter:  Luscious as the flowers are, it's the evergreen foliage that's the real excitement here (and which is why it as great to visit the vine at 6.BC in mid-October).
Unique bean-shaped leaflets all hang together in a general pendant cascade, but even so, they are what gives this vine its leg up: The stem of each leaflet can wrap around just about anything narrower than, say, a broomstick.
Including another leaflet.  So give your Armand a strong wire to climb when it's young, and then just stand back.

The stems soon thicken almost into trunk-like dimension...

...and are a show in themselves.


This was a great year for snails, which are this far North aren't not the omnivorous terror they can be in milder climes.


Clematis armandii can grow to mighty proportions. It can't climb up masonry or trees the way stem-rooters like ivy or trumpet vine can, but on the other hand, it can clothe wire mesh or chain-link fence with ease.

Those lucky enough to garden in warm Zone 7 and Southward can have Armand clematis big enough to cover the biggest pergolas, where the ever-questing new growth cascades off the structure with sui generis grace and enthusiasm.

(I'm told that the vines can built up quite a "thatch" of older growth in these favored circumstances, but like all clematis Armand welcomes drastic renewal pruning. Immediately after the Spring blooming would be the ticket here.)

Armand is happiest when it doesn't have to worry about getting enough water. Planting where it gets some afternoon shade is one trick, as is getting out the hose during a drought.

6bc's specimen in Manhattan is in the cold end of Zone 7, but it's Zone 7 nonetheless—as proved by its  location right out there at the street-side fence along Sixth Street in the East Village, without any shelter from Winter wind. And yet the foliage gets through the cold months unscathed.  I remember one nasty Winter morning, in the single digits, when I bundled up just so I could trudge over and check it out. The foliage was pristine, and the plant had a certain "Oh, you poor human, so unsuited for a nice brisk Winter day" attitude.

My Rhode Island gardens are Zone 7 only in this or that luckiest micro-climate, though, so before I plant my Armand out in prime Zone 7 real estate I'll keep it in a pot for a few years to let it build up some horsepower.  That said, if the plant has severe Winter die-back the early Spring flowers would be sacrificed. A bit more severe still, and even the trunk-like main stems can die back at their tips. Still more severe?  Right to the ground. This is why, like all clematis, Armand welcomes being planted deeper than it was in the pot.  Then there are stem buds safely underground, to regenerate the plant entirely when needed.

But so what if there is dieback?  A little or even whole lot?  With foliage this indelibly memorable and exciting year-round, who really needs the flowers? Who needs a huge swathe of Armand even?  Any amount of Armand at all would be a joy, a triumph.

Stay tuned.

Sooner or later, you come around to gentians because there's (almost) no other way to get their intense blue colors into your garden.

Cobalt blue, indigo blue—or here, with Gentiana scabra, a mid-blue.

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Its common name is "rough" gentian because the foliage is, now that I think of it, a bit scratchy.  Definitely not the sleek-and-smooth willow leaves more typical of gentians.

But the flowers are everything with gentians, so what a slight to have the name be inspired by the foliage.  Doubly because the flowers here are so worth latinizing (if only I had that literacy).  Not least because they are so late:  This picture is from a couple of weeks ago—the start of October—and here it is the 16th and the colony seems just now to be firing on all cylinders.

And large: Clusters of buds that are almost two inches long open to these blue-lipped trumpets.

And sophisticated:  The trails of eggplant-colored dots leading you to the greenish base of the flower only make the ivory tips of central pistol and stamen structure all the more showy.

Gentians seem (to this foolish beginner) to be easy keepers: As long as they get plenty of sun, and have a soil with plenty of grit or even pebbles in it (for drainage as well as for who-knows-what minerals)—but don't at the same time get drought-stressed—they seem willing.  (True, gentians are a huge family with obscure as well as touchy relatives, and I'm only growing the easy ones.)

But gritty soil that doesn't dry out?  That's the trick: If you grow gentians in a trough, it's a synch to have that gritty soil.  But you'll need to water daily from July through September.  If you grow gentians in the ground you have (in my paltry experience) better luck because the roots can go deeper into the soil, where it's comparative moister and cooler in even the scorching days of August.  But watering will still be needed.  Either way, blues these big, these intense, demand their due.  And whenever a gentian's in bloom, the price seems an insane bargain.

At least you don't have to worry about hardiness:  Gentians are so often alpine in origin that my warm Zone 6 Winters aren't worth dignifying as "cold."  And if you live in Ottawa (Zone 3 if you can imagine it), many gentians will finally feel the comfortingly-unrelenting Winters they grew up with in the Alps and the Himalayas.

Gentian scabra gets about two feet across (I'm still waiting on that score), and the stems are floppy to the point of prostration.  Only at the tips to they put on an inch or two of elevation, hoisting the big buds up out of the mud.  And at a time in the gardening seasons when I so often am focused on getting the chores done before snow—the chopping, the digging, the bringing-into-shelter—it's a startle indeed to find that one of my perennials isn't rushing at all.  For a gentian, these 40-degree nights are plenty warm enough to keep celebrating.

How many weeks has hardy plumbago been in bloom already?  Since Labor Day?  This would be the tenth week then.   Amazing.

And it's still going, even as the leaves turn to the their burgundy Fall color.  What a tirelessly enthusiastic plant.

The flowers are actually a bit darker than plumbago's, but of the same size and shape.  They do their namesake one better, though, arising from bud clusters that are a lovely contrasting burgundy.

The Latin is ceratostigma.  Ceratostigma plumbaginoides.  Plumbago-like ceratostigma.  Whereas plumbago itself is subtropical, surviving only into the mid-20's, hardy plumbago couldn't be more honestly named.  It's Zone 5, so can survive to 20 below.  Part of the reason for the hardiness is that much of the plant is underground year-round, out of the way of dicey weather on the surface.  The stems only poke above ground after the weather has really warmed up in the Spring.

Here's how to keep it at its happiest and therefore hardiest.  Good winter drainage is essential, so plant it on a slope if at all possible.  And give it all possible sun and heat; it loves to stretch out onto hot stones or paving.

Ceratostigma is a naturally creeping and sprawling colony of a plant with no particular center, so it's a congenial partner for tall Spring bulbs, hardy gladioli, or upright grasses like panicum and calamagrostis.  It just flows right around them.

I've heard that ceratostigma can grow thickly enough to work as a groundcover, but I'm just happy to have it as a front-of-the-bed filler along the pathway out from the back door.

Wisteria flowers?  The triumph of the merely gorgeous.  Wisteria pods?  The triumph of the odd or even the creepy.

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The line-up of pods on this wisteria-covered railing are, well, interesting, looking like little green gourds.  Or maybe a year's supply of vegetarian salami.

Or maybe, in less optimistic lighting, a mass suicide of gophers.

In my book, any interpretation is welcome:  The worst aesthetic failing of a garden is to be uninteresting.  Anything but boring, please.  Sure, go ahead if that means being just pretty.  As long as you can manage it without sagging into the saccharine or the superficial; no mounds-o-mums, please.

And boy can wisteria can do Pretty for those couple of weeks when it's in bloom in Spring, when anything—even Pretty—is a joy after months of Winter.  Bring on those countless fragrant flowers in chains a yard long and more.  Wisteria really is Pretty Without Peer.

But Pretty isn't forever.  Spring's tulips are summer's compost.  And thank goodness:  Would tulips be as exciting week after week, month after month?  Who could stand all that unashamed color, that insistently optimistic skyward smile?

But there's no such time limit on Interesting.    Interesting isn't as glaring, as nakedly hue-full, as incessantly radiant, as Pretty. You can have Interesting around the house—Interesting in your life—all the time and not need to reach for the sunglasses or the Motrin.

And Interesting isn't afraid of "going dark" either.  It has the same deeper bitter notes that make chocolate, coffee, charcuterie, pickles, capers, anchovies, and wines and spirits so stimulating.  Which make wisteria such a satisfaction:  When it flowers, it does Pretty.  And then, with economy as well as inspiration, it takes those merely Pretty flower chains and morphs or rather matures them into deeply Interesting pods.

Not like peas or beans, where you intuit that there's an orderly row of edibles inside. Productive, delicious, nutritious, quotidien.  Ho hum.

Nothing as obvious for wisteria pods, which are bigger, fuller at the bottom, heavy with...what?  And for months, as the pods hang around, hang on and on and on, that's the question.  What's in those things anyway?  And so you get out the stepladder, climb up it and cut one off.  This one, actually, right in the center.

And you find that the pods are suede to the touch.  Vegetarian velvet.  Are they designed to appeal to foragers with an aesthetic sense of touch?  This is a vine that plays with your head.


Velvety or not, this pod's coming under the knife.



It's a strikingly difficult, uh, incision.  The pod itself is strong, and there sure aren't any mere peas in it.



What's inside?  A lot of pith, and only two seeds. 
They were the woodiest portion of all.  Can you call anything a pea that was so woody you could barely slice through it?  How about the, uh, pea's lovely bright-green interior? (Aesthetics are everywhere!)

So, the occasional bulge in the wisteria pod is where the occasional pea is; the rest is pith.


Peas, pith, pods: None is pretty by any conventional measure. But on the vine or on the cutting board—or, I bet, as dried pods in a Winter arrangement—wisteria pods are so much more engaging, let alone long-lasting, than the sensational but ephemeral blossoms that produced them.


Thrilling in the short term, curiously engaging in the long: Wisteria could hardly be a better inspiration.

Beauty is in the darndest places.  Here are three pots of papyrus that were sooo happy outside standing in a big tub of water May through, well, yesterday, October 18.  So happy that they are now way too big to wheelbarrow into shelter for the winter.


A cup of coffee and I'll know what to do.

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Standing around, the pots of papyrus and I, I couldn't help noticing how terrifically colorful the sheath at the base of each cane is.  The color of mahogany lumber, even cherry wood.  Nice!


I hadn't seen the sheaths before because the pots were usually several inches deep in the water.  And so the sheaths were semi-submerged too.  But more important was that I was like any other papyrus-neophyte Northerner for whom the plant's appeal is (so we think at first) all about the thread-leaf poofy heads of foliage atop tall and taller and taller canes.

In short, I was too busy looking at the top of my papyrus to notice how cool the bottom was.  Only at the last day of the papyrus's 2010 Summer of Fun did I finally wise up and take a look.  How vivid the green canes are inside the warm cherry-mahogany sheaths.  What a show!


And now that my mind has been opened up enough that my eyes can look beyond the (admittedly) marvelous thready texture of the green foliage atop the ever-higher canes, I see that there's a matching warm mahogany sheath around the foliage too.  When the foliage matures and pops out of the sheath, the sheath sometimes bends back, but other times (see the lower right cane) just bows outward to let the poof of foliage by.

It's the same marvelous color contrast as at the bottom of the canes, but just a blip of it.  There's none of the dimension or intensity of the water-level display.

Huh: How many plants are even more interestingly colorful at the bottom than at the top?  Who knew?

Colorful or not, these huge clumps are still completely too fragile for transport.  The canes aren't stable when the plant's in motion, snapping at the slightest bump or brush-up.  And besides, papyrus is incredibly quick growing in warm weather:  These three plants were little skinny waifs in four-inch pots when I bought them, and yet here they are, the muscle-bound monsters in five-gallon pots by October.

So there's no need to preserve the canes of Summer to get your papyrus indoors for the Winter.


And so in a minute, there they were, all cut and on the ground.


With the canes all cut, you can see their pure-white interior.  Yet another moment of high-contrast color.  The white is the pith, which was sliced lengthwise into thin narrow strips that were then pressed together into papyrus paper.  (It's another Who Knew? moment, completely non-intuitive.  But after centuries of life along the Nile, I suppose you're bound to discover just about anything that can be discovered about the local flora and fauna.)

Now easy to handle, the pots are loaded up in the truck for transport to the greenhouse.  And so they're high enough to bring my attention to yet another sight-to-see: their feathery roots.


Even they continue the theme of color contrast:  White tips aging to yellow then tan then brown.  Papyrus certainly stays consistent with its above-the-water priority.  Color every where, please!  From root-tip to leaf-top, this plant is a brightly stylish show.  The plant just doesn't admit the possibility that any little smidge or corner could just be dull green, flat brown, or dirty white.


These plants are way too flashy to plant in nursery pots (let alone those with the nursery name on them). Respect must be paid to papyrus's stem-to-stern performance.  Next Summer I'll see if there's a way to have the pots themselves be attractive as well as elevated a couple of inches above the water, so papyrus's seriously visual "bottom notes" can be part of the show instead of being submerged and out of sight.

And the cut canes? Into a vase for a last day or two of excitement.

Papyrus certainly is a show, every inch of it.  And even after it's in the greenhouse, its cut canes are the show it leaves behind.  A great performance as well as a great coda?  Applause please!

And gratitude too:  in Summer 2011, papyrus will have the prominence it deserves.

Papyrus sure showed its star quality even as it sat in the back of the truck heading to the Winter greenhouse.  And so I was on the alert for another Tailgate Moment.

And here is it:  two pots of a shrub-sized palm-leaved begonia, rightly named Begonia luxurians.

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The huge palm-like leaves dwarf even my big paws.


The heads of delicate (meaning small) white and yellow flowers are more common in Winter, and definitely can't compete with the powerful show of the foliage.

Like papyrus, Begonia luxurians grows tall and wobbly canes.  They create the admittedly luxuriant wide-and-shrubby look, but also make the plant just as frustratingly snap-prone if moved.

But because a happy begonia is a quick-growing one, there's no particular need to try to preserve this year's canes anyway.  After a minute's clipping, the pair of pots are now completely portable.



Begonia luxurians is never interested in temperatures below fifty, let alone below freezing.  So only after six months of safe and above-fifty overwintering in the greenhouse will this pair be interested in coming outside to play in my gardens.  May 2011: It's a date.