In a garden stuffed with horticultural divas, I need to welcome all the background functionaries I can. I've already got so many generals, stars, and focal points, but no garden really succeeds without their back-up retinues.

For each general, his infantry and spear carriers.

For each drop-dead focal point, the accompanying backdrop of the tasteful masses.

For each Diana Ross, her girl-group of Supremes.

And so, with pride and appreciation, here's Collinsonia canadensis.
Hardy Citronella, indeed. The flowers are intensely fragrant (especially considering their tiny size), like lemon verbena with a dash of bitters. Pale yellow and in clusters of scores, even hundreds, they're a willing ornament to anything within view.

The fragrance doesn't carry down into the foliage, though; it's just infused with the bitters. But it's big and thick enough to work as groundcover.

These three are first-year plants, and yet already in bloom, and happy to be doing their part.

Collinsonia is hardy to Zone 3, too, so all of you gardeners in Ottawa, listen up! It matures at two feet tall and wide, even a bit more, so I can spread these three plants out in the Spring. I'm looking forward to 2011's bigger picture of collinsonia as bodacious as it can be. Even spear carriers deserve recognition.

I like the tall catmints. (Here’s one from China, Nepeta yunnanensis, back when it was happiest at the front of my Red Gardens.)
With green leaves and growing three feet tall maybe more, the tall catmints work with the height of plants in my gardens.

They also have a “What the—?” effect too. Without the grey leaves and hunkered-down habit of the more typical varieties (Walker’s Low, Six Hills Giant), they clearly aren’t rosemary or lavender wannabe’s. They’re clearly not Walker’s Low or Six Hills Giant either. But they’re also way too short, overall and flower-spike length, to be delphiniums.

So, you think: Maybe adenophora or campanula?
The flowers of both are much larger.

It's the fragrance of the foliage that lets the cat out of the bag. Pungent but with “green” notes instead of the astringence of dry-climate icons like rosemary, bayberry, or juniper: This is a catmint after all.

(Isn’t it great when plants are also a bit of a puzzle, not just easy and pretty?)

The green leaves are the give-away that these tall catmints are also less on the look-out for the sharp drainage, full sun, and scanty rain that grey-leaved plants typically require. And indeed, Nepeta yunnanensis thrives in heavier soil and with squishier ground in Winter. Always a plus for me, with aptly-named “dead”-flat terrain and rich soil.

And the green leaves also mean that tall catmints can be transplanted just as easily in the Fall. (Anything grey-leaved is normally Spring-dig only.)

And transplanting is just what’s going to happen. Check out the video.

Matt Mattus's blog is always worth following—not least when it showed his success with the spectactular South African amaryllis cousin, the brunsvigia.
Depending on which species you grow—there are about twenty—the immense sphere of flowers can be up to two feet across. FEET!

And always, arising from an otherwise-leafless bulb. Here's why: The brunsvigs are all native to cool-wet-Winter, dry-droughty-Summer climates in South Africa. The foliage grows easily with the plentiful water of the (duh!) wet season, and stores up energy and water to thrust up the flower structure in the dry season. When the flowers fade and set seed, they remain attached to the the entire soccer-ball-sized structure, which eventually detaches from the plant and is tumble-weeded by the wind far and wide, spreading seeds as it bounces along. If the flowering and seed-set were in wet weather, the structure would rot away instead of rolling away, and the seeds would just slump down to the ground around the mother bulb.

Who Knew?

And what a successful lifestyle it is. Here're acres of land completely colonized by brunsvigia.
No wonder these astounding plants were part of the "Plants" episode on David Attenborough's "Life" documentary series on the Discovery Channel.

As Matt proved, brunsvigs can be grown in pots too. So I'll try again; I had a small one from (sigh) Seneca Hills Nursery, so recently closed and sorely missed, but I didn't attend to it sufficiently.

Telos Rare Bulbs still sells them. The variety I crave is still the red-flowered Brunsvigia radulosa.
This is a picture from the incredible African Bulbs, and here's another.

Sizzling!

The Pacific Bulb Society has a terrific link on brunsvigia. If you have success with one, well then why not another, and another, and another?

Weeping beeches, a force of Nature. Each an individual, each demanding and also deserving your biggest hunk of land, your most respectfully prominent spot.

And each an irresistible secret space.

Middletown, Rhode Island is on the same island as Newport, the town that has more beeches per capita than any other.
And so the urge to have the ultimate arboreal haystack strikes even when there isn't really the room.

For the first thirty years, so far so good—but then what happens when the beech finally grows over the line?
Or in this case, out over the road?

When I first moved to Rhode Island I thought, wow, what a weird maintenance hassle for the town, to have to send out crews to prune beech canopies that would otherwise weep right down to the pavement, blocking traffic for good.

And wouldn't that be a good idea. Alas, the truck traffic on this major road is so heavy and so fast that the vehicles themselves do the pruning.

They shear off any branch tips that hang low—making the immaculate flat-bottomed canopy you see here.

And because pruning off a branch tip just inspires the side branches to grow, the truck pruning only serves to create more and more branch tips, on a wider and wider overhanging canopy.

Maybe in fifty years more, the trucks will have helped this tree to weep all the way across the road, to make a beech tunnel?

Here's another beech that's making great progress.
It's already reached across the two lanes of traffic.

Half-way there.

When we last ogled the Swamp Lily —September 18— it was a-fixin' to bloom.

Four days later —September 22— it was still just a-fixin', but the buds sure had lengthened and flexed outward in preparation.
Day by day, and from every angle...

...it was a show full of impending excitement.


The opening, though, was in the rain of the night of September 23. This is the awesome display that greeted me the following morning.
Boy is it lucky to have the feathery reed Elegia capensis right next door. Catching the rain drops, it's even more sumptuously subtle than ever. And a striking contrast to the broad, huge, unashamedly voluptuous crinum flowers (let alone Canna 'Striped Beauty' foliage at the backgroup.)

Jeez-o-Pete, what a show.

My only quibble: The crinum flowers don't appear to open flat first, then flex into curves.
They open directly into the curves. How much more startling would be flat-open flowers.

But to criticize would be ungrateful. This is a major display already. I bow low (and did each time I took pictures.)

Crinums are so tough and enduring where they are indigenous that I don't know that they get similar respect in their native haunts. Down South you'll see them by the bathroom doors of abandoned gas stations. (Not even at the front door. Oh the indignity.) At the edge of concrete-slab houses where the houses as well as any gardening occupants got outa town years ago. In public parks where already-mangey state budgets have been shredded far beyond maintenance of public flora. And yet the crinums are thriving, even out-of-control.

And of course, this crinum is a Swamp Lily. Who is going to risk attack by snakes and crocs to check it out in Alabama?

No, grow a crinum in New England: That's where this plant can provide the maximum impact. Maximum shock, even. Where it will really be adored.

The first hedge to be truly "Hedge-o-monic" in my garden is of American holly. (Not least because in a very good year I spent, oh, $10 K to have huge plants brought in a planted.)
The hedge is ten feet tall and about a hundred feet long. It's deer-proof, totally hardy, only needs one pruning a year (which it loves), and can be kept to a given size indefinitely or—should the whim ever strike—be cut down to a stump with a chain saw to start the growth all over again.

After the hot weather fades a bit in September, it's not the top or the sides of the hedge that get attention, it's the bottom: It's just cool enough for me to wear a heavy long-sleeved shirt so I crawl under the length of the hedge and weed without getting speared to death by the holly leaves. Foot by foot, I scrunch under and around, yanking out the usual nightmare thugs that infest everything here in New England: Poison ivy, bittersweet, Boston ivy, multiflora rose, bindweed...
...and—most colorfully along the south face—golden rod.

(Yup, that's deer-fence on the outside face of the holly. It's not there for the holly, whose thorns make it very easily deer-proof, but to help with the enclosure of the rest of the garden. The hedge is just a handy structural wall to tie it to. Alas, the deer-fence is also a handy trellis for weed vines, and a tiresome barrier to the weeding. It's why I need to weed by crawling right under the hedge, not just reaching in from the side.)

A couple of hours later, everything is yanked.
Click to see the large-size improvement.

But then there's the grass along the stones. Now that the weeds are gone, this further nicety can be considered.
But with no string trimmer on-hand? Oh what the hell, I just do it with kitchen scissors.

After being on all-fours for the weeding, getting jabbed by holly branches and getting holly leave down my back, mere kneeling and scissoring-off handfuls of pokey-up grass? That's relaxation.

This is my best year ever for tropical gingers.
Thanks (but in unknowable proportion) to a mixture of luck, persistence, good weather, daily watering, regular fertilizing, and (probably) serious pot-bounded-ness, my gaggle of gingers—Tara, Daniel Weeks, Elizabeth, Dr. Moy, Vanilla Ice, and Disney— have all bloomed or are in eager bud.

And what buds! The corn-cob structure at the tip of each cane makes a show in itself. But then orchid-like, colorful, and highly fragrant flowers erupt from them. This is Raffillii (which even the experts can't tell from Tara), whose orange and individually-orchid-like flowers turn each cob into an ear a foot tall and half as wide. Any day now—and you'll be the first to know right after I take the pictures.

Gingers are long-season plants, and this far North they are just as liable to never show buds before frost as they are to bloom. I kept mine green and growing all Winter in the greenhouse instead of letting them sit out the Winter with the other tubers—dahlias, cannas, glads—in the basement. So that's helpful factor (hmm, let me count the list above) seven. Whatever it takes.

Truly, stay tuned for pictures and posts on the flowers. Yum!

Bush clover's late-season flowers give it automatic welcome in August and September gardens.
Here's my pair of 'Gibralter', bringing thousands and thousands of small deep-pink flowers to my Pink Borders.

But 'Gibralter' and all of its cousins (including the wonderfully-white-flowered 'Avalanche') are notoriously cascade-o-philic: Nothing they like more than to sprawl so far out that "sprawl" becomes "flop." Great if you have the room and (for some reason) it's important to be able to see over your bush.

Lespedeza japonica is the bush clover to grow when flopping isn't your style, and elegant screening is.

I have three of them in a row, and they're eight feet tall. They only get so wide because each stem is so bushy. For this bush, "flopping" per se is an F-word.

This is a later and longer bloomer than Gibralter too: Mid-September right through to mid-October.

And the white flowers mix just as well with end-of-Summer's yellow daisies (not to mention goldenrod) as well as pink and rose asters.

Bush clovers are happy in full sun and any decent soil. Cut last year's stems down to the ground in early Spring before the new ones sprout. You can pinch 'Gibralter' in early June, which will motivate it to branch out and flop less, or at least more attractively. And even Lespedeza japonica appreciates a bit of support: the stems are so branchy and flower-laden that heavy rains can (temporarily) weigh the whole colony down into an 'Avalanche'-like slump.