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.

Hello dear readers:  We've been beavering away low this Winter at the new phase of "Dirt":  www.LouisThePlantGeek.com.  It opens this month.  (The Launch Party in New York City is May 2, so we're dead-line driven.)

Please come visit www.LouisThePlantGeek.com for even more incredible plants, my triumphs and tribulations with them in my own gardens that we've followed so faithfully through the years of "Dirt On the Keys", tips on how to grow them at their best, and recommendations for gardens that showcase them around the world.

And—Best of all?  Well, maybe—one-minute videos are now a big part of the medium.  (Golly do we love text-and-stills, but sometimes you just have to get out there and move!)

www.LouisThePlantGeek.com:  Uncommon & Astonishing Plants, at home and around the world.

See you there!

Louis

The Quartet of Conduit Pots

The shock of Fall, when the garden that looks like this in July....



...looks like this in mid-December.



Instead of billowing voluptuousness—crowded foliage and flowers, fleets of containers—there are now mostly sticks, how-much-mess to be raked up—and what are those black spiral things?  (Which were right there in the high Summer picture, but barely visible amid all the surf of foliage and the distraction of flowers.  Go ahead: take another look in the Summer picture above.  I'll wait.)

The black spiral things are the black "conduit" pots.  And yes, they're on stands.  They get emptied, dismantled, and brought under cover for the Winter; the front-left one is already half-way in transit.

The structural stuff first, then the "Why-the-hell-would-anyone-want-that?" stuff.

The spiral part is a section of big galvanized-steel culvert, power-coated black.



It's two feet in diameter—big enough to hold a 25-gallon black nursery pot.



Take out the nursery pot, and you can see that the spiral conduit just fits onto a round black-steel stand.



The stand, in turn...



...is poked down into and atop a yew.



That yew is the end of a hedge of yews (in this case heading out to the left).  The hedge itself will be ten feet tall (someday); right now it's small and gappy and barely three feet tall.
PICTURE When the hedge IS ten feet tall, and full and happy, the end yew under the black-steel stand will have filled out as well, completely hiding the stand.  The section of spiral conduit will look like a crazy (in a good way) pot sitting on a low yew at the end of the hedge.  A garden version of a newel post at the end of a balastrade.

With all four of the conduit pots in the carriage house for the Winter, the long axis of the garden is more quiet.  And with the brush raked—tomorrow I promise—the gentle Winter collapse of the beds on either side is, actually, a nice contrast.  Order and geometry flanked by Winter-induced chaos.



But look again at the garden with the four (well three) conduits in place.



Those four pots make a rectangle; right now there're piles of brush at the center of it.  But in the Summer, lots of pots are grouped around a big tender tree.



The center group and the four conduit pots set up an energy field, so to speak:  They section-out some of the long axis, so it isn't just a long axis.  It's a series of more human-scaled set-pieces.

If I stand at about the center of the conduit-pot rectangle—where the tropical tree and the pots are grouped in the Summer—and at look East, I'm facing back to the house.


Between me and the house is a rose pergola spanning the axis like a huppah.  And forty feet in back of that, the French doors into room at the heart of the house: the center hall with the huge fireplace.  It all lines up, from the chimney right on out into the garden.

Facing West, back the other way, there's some year-round shrubbery topped in the Summer that incredible white-agave thing called a furcraea.



With the furcraea in the greenhouse for the Winter, you can see that the grass beyond it widens way out to make room for the reflecting pool.  Seventy feet long, but only as wide as the grass of the axis.







In the snowy part of Winter, the young sequoia at the end is at its strongest reveal. (When the sequoia is seventy feet tall, we won't have to worry that it will show up year-round.)

With the center chimney to start, the rose pergola "huppah" as the first pause, and the furcraea the last pause before the big Reflecting Pool garden and the climactic sequoia beyond it, the quartet of conduit pots is the mid-point of the garden's biggest journey.  So it's the center everything.  And as such, that center needed some serious demarcation.

It wasn't enough that there's also a cross-pathway through the conduit-rectangle's center point, leading to the North, to the carriage house...



...and to the south, to a free-standing wisteria that will, in time, be backed by a ten-foot hedge of American holly.



But with the bulk and billow of the gardens themselves in warm weather, you don't notice this crosswalk until you're right at its crossing.  (Which is great: it's a discovery, a surprise.)  But in itself it can't help "center" the axis as you look down it.

I needed some other kind of marker for that center, that says, without a doubt: You Are Here.  And so, the quartet of huge, black, spiral-steel pots, looking like they're perched on yews.

And in the Summer, their shocking prehistoric-looking plants.



Pretty good, eh?  It's starting to look like the pot is, indeed, perching atop the yew.  And how about those annuals?  Solanum quitoense with variegated ivy.  Yum.

And early one particularly misty morning, the furry leaves catch all the dew and turn into spiny silver velvet.



Incredible!  But this is, after all, the center.  Respect must be paid, and why waste the opportunity?  Part of the thrill of a garden is creating the intense need to Do Something Right Here—and then going right ahead and Doing it.

But this being New England, not California, the shocking prehistoric-looking plants are only annuals, and the pots themselves will last the longest when they enjoy five months—mid-December through mid-May—out of the cold weather.

Through the long Winter and even into early Spring, then, the conduit pots are gone.  The long axis is "just" a long axis, with only length to recommend it.



But at almost 500 feet, house-to-sequoia, length is its own thrill.

The Quartet of Conduit Pots

The shock of Fall, when the garden that looks like this in July....



...looks like this in mid-December.



Instead of billowing voluptuousness—crowded foliage and flowers, fleets of containers—there are now mostly sticks, how-much-mess to be raked up—and what are those black spiral things?  (Which were right there in the high Summer picture, but barely visible amid all the surf of foliage and the distraction of flowers.  Go ahead: take another look in the Summer picture above.  I'll wait.)

The black spiral things are the black "conduit" pots.  And yes, they're on stands.  They get emptied, dismantled, and brought under cover for the Winter; the front-left one is already half-way in transit.

The structural stuff first, then the "Why-the-hell-would-anyone-want-that?" stuff.

The spiral part is a section of big galvanized-steel culvert, power-coated black.



It's two feet in diameter—big enough to hold a 25-gallon black nursery pot.



Take out the nursery pot, and you can see that the spiral conduit just fits onto a round black-steel stand.



The stand, in turn...



...is poked down into and atop a yew.



That yew is the end of a hedge of yews (in this case heading out to the left).  The hedge itself will be ten feet tall (someday); right now it's small and gappy and barely three feet tall.
PICTURE When the hedge IS ten feet tall, and full and happy, the end yew under the black-steel stand will have filled out as well, completely hiding the stand.  The section of spiral conduit will look like a crazy (in a good way) pot sitting on a low yew at the end of the hedge.  A garden version of a newel post at the end of a balastrade.

With all four of the conduit pots in the carriage house for the Winter, the long axis of the garden is more quiet.  And with the brush raked—tomorrow I promise—the gentle Winter collapse of the beds on either side is, actually, a nice contrast.  Order and geometry flanked by Winter-induced chaos.



But look again at the garden with the four (well three) conduits in place.



Those four pots make a rectangle; right now there're piles of brush at the center of it.  But in the Summer, lots of pots are grouped around a big tender tree.



The center group and the four conduit pots set up an energy field, so to speak:  They section-out some of the long axis, so it isn't just a long axis.  It's a series of more human-scaled set-pieces.

If I stand at about the center of the conduit-pot rectangle—where the tropical tree and the pots are grouped in the Summer—and at look East, I'm facing back to the house.


Between me and the house is a rose pergola spanning the axis like a huppah.  And forty feet in back of that, the French doors into room at the heart of the house: the center hall with the huge fireplace.  It all lines up, from the chimney right on out into the garden.

Facing West, back the other way, there's some year-round shrubbery topped in the Summer that incredible white-agave thing called a furcraea.



With the furcraea in the greenhouse for the Winter, you can see that the grass beyond it widens way out to make room for the reflecting pool.  Seventy feet long, but only as wide as the grass of the axis.







In the snowy part of Winter, the young sequoia at the end is at its strongest reveal. (When the sequoia is seventy feet tall, we won't have to worry that it will show up year-round.)

With the center chimney to start, the rose pergola "huppah" as the first pause, and the furcraea the last pause before the big Reflecting Pool garden and the climactic sequoia beyond it, the quartet of conduit pots is the mid-point of the garden's biggest journey.  So it's the center everything.  And as such, that center needed some serious demarcation.

It wasn't enough that there's also a cross-pathway through the conduit-rectangle's center point, leading to the North, to the carriage house...



...and to the south, to a free-standing wisteria that will, in time, be backed by a ten-foot hedge of American holly.



But with the bulk and billow of the gardens themselves in warm weather, you don't notice this crosswalk until you're right at its crossing.  (Which is great: it's a discovery, a surprise.)  But in itself it can't help "center" the axis as you look down it.

I needed some other kind of marker for that center, that says, without a doubt: You Are Here.  And so, the quartet of huge, black, spiral-steel pots, looking like they're perched on yews.

And in the Summer, their shocking prehistoric-looking plants.



Pretty good, eh?  It's starting to look like the pot is, indeed, perching atop the yew.  And how about those annuals?  Solanum quitoense with variegated ivy.  Yum.

And early one particularly misty morning, the furry leaves catch all the dew and turn into spiny silver velvet.



Incredible!  But this is, after all, the center.  Respect must be paid, and why waste the opportunity?  Part of the thrill of a garden is creating the intense need to Do Something Right Here—and then going right ahead and Doing it.

But this being New England, not California, the shocking prehistoric-looking plants are only annuals, and the pots themselves will last the longest when they enjoy five months—mid-December through mid-May—out of the cold weather.

Through the long Winter and even into early Spring, then, the conduit pots are gone.  The long axis is "just" a long axis, with only length to recommend it.



But at almost 500 feet, house-to-sequoia, length is its own thrill.

The Quartet of Conduit Pots

The shock of Fall, when the garden that looks like this in July....



...looks like this in mid-December.



Instead of billowing voluptuousness—crowded foliage and flowers, fleets of containers—there are now mostly sticks, how-much-mess to be raked up—and what are those black spiral things?  (Which were right there in the high Summer picture, but barely visible amid all the surf of foliage and the distraction of flowers.  Go ahead: take another look in the Summer picture above.  I'll wait.)

The black spiral things are the black "conduit" pots.  And yes, they're on stands.  They get emptied, dismantled, and brought under cover for the Winter; the front-left one is already half-way in transit.

The structural stuff first, then the "Why-the-hell-would-anyone-want-that?" stuff.

The spiral part is a section of big galvanized-steel culvert, power-coated black.



It's two feet in diameter—big enough to hold a 25-gallon black nursery pot.



Take out the nursery pot, and you can see that the spiral conduit just fits onto a round black-steel stand.



The stand, in turn...



...is poked down into and atop a yew.



That yew is the end of a hedge of yews (in this case heading out to the left).  The hedge itself will be ten feet tall (someday); right now it's small and gappy and barely three feet tall.
PICTURE When the hedge IS ten feet tall, and full and happy, the end yew under the black-steel stand will have filled out as well, completely hiding the stand.  The section of spiral conduit will look like a crazy (in a good way) pot sitting on a low yew at the end of the hedge.  A garden version of a newel post at the end of a balastrade.

With all four of the conduit pots in the carriage house for the Winter, the long axis of the garden is more quiet.  And with the brush raked—tomorrow I promise—the gentle Winter collapse of the beds on either side is, actually, a nice contrast.  Order and geometry flanked by Winter-induced chaos.



But look again at the garden with the four (well three) conduits in place.



Those four pots make a rectangle; right now there're piles of brush at the center of it.  But in the Summer, lots of pots are grouped around a big tender tree.



The center group and the four conduit pots set up an energy field, so to speak:  They section-out some of the long axis, so it isn't just a long axis.  It's a series of more human-scaled set-pieces.

If I stand at about the center of the conduit-pot rectangle—where the tropical tree and the pots are grouped in the Summer—and at look East, I'm facing back to the house.


Between me and the house is a rose pergola spanning the axis like a huppah.  And forty feet in back of that, the French doors into room at the heart of the house: the center hall with the huge fireplace.  It all lines up, from the chimney right on out into the garden.

Facing West, back the other way, there's some year-round shrubbery topped in the Summer that incredible white-agave thing called a furcraea.



With the furcraea in the greenhouse for the Winter, you can see that the grass beyond it widens way out to make room for the reflecting pool.  Seventy feet long, but only as wide as the grass of the axis.







In the snowy part of Winter, the young sequoia at the end is at its strongest reveal. (When the sequoia is seventy feet tall, we won't have to worry that it will show up year-round.)

With the center chimney to start, the rose pergola "huppah" as the first pause, and the furcraea the last pause before the big Reflecting Pool garden and the climactic sequoia beyond it, the quartet of conduit pots is the mid-point of the garden's biggest journey.  So it's the center everything.  And as such, that center needed some serious demarcation.

It wasn't enough that there's also a cross-pathway through the conduit-rectangle's center point, leading to the North, to the carriage house...



...and to the south, to a free-standing wisteria that will, in time, be backed by a ten-foot hedge of American holly.



But with the bulk and billow of the gardens themselves in warm weather, you don't notice this crosswalk until you're right at its crossing.  (Which is great: it's a discovery, a surprise.)  But in itself it can't help "center" the axis as you look down it.

I needed some other kind of marker for that center, that says, without a doubt: You Are Here.  And so, the quartet of huge, black, spiral-steel pots, looking like they're perched on yews.

And in the Summer, their shocking prehistoric-looking plants.



Pretty good, eh?  It's starting to look like the pot is, indeed, perching atop the yew.  And how about those annuals?  Solanum quitoense with variegated ivy.  Yum.

And early one particularly misty morning, the furry leaves catch all the dew and turn into spiny silver velvet.



Incredible!  But this is, after all, the center.  Respect must be paid, and why waste the opportunity?  Part of the thrill of a garden is creating the intense need to Do Something Right Here—and then going right ahead and Doing it.

But this being New England, not California, the shocking prehistoric-looking plants are only annuals, and the pots themselves will last the longest when they enjoy five months—mid-December through mid-May—out of the cold weather.

Through the long Winter and even into early Spring, then, the conduit pots are gone.  The long axis is "just" a long axis, with only length to recommend it.



But at almost 500 feet, house-to-sequoia, length is its own thrill.

The Quartet of Conduit Pots

The shock of Fall, when the garden that looks like this in July....



...looks like this in mid-December.



Instead of billowing voluptuousness—crowded foliage and flowers, fleets of containers—there are now mostly sticks, how-much-mess to be raked up—and what are those black spiral things?  (Which were right there in the high Summer picture, but barely visible amid all the surf of foliage and the distraction of flowers.  Go ahead: take another look in the Summer picture above.  I'll wait.)

The black spiral things are the black "conduit" pots.  And yes, they're on stands.  They get emptied, dismantled, and brought under cover for the Winter; the front-left one is already half-way in transit.

The structural stuff first, then the "Why-the-hell-would-anyone-want-that?" stuff.

The spiral part is a section of big galvanized-steel culvert, power-coated black.



It's two feet in diameter—big enough to hold a 25-gallon black nursery pot.



Take out the nursery pot, and you can see that the spiral conduit just fits onto a round black-steel stand.



The stand, in turn...



...is poked down into and atop a yew.



That yew is the end of a hedge of yews (in this case heading out to the left).  The hedge itself will be ten feet tall (someday); right now it's small and gappy and barely three feet tall.
PICTURE When the hedge IS ten feet tall, and full and happy, the end yew under the black-steel stand will have filled out as well, completely hiding the stand.  The section of spiral conduit will look like a crazy (in a good way) pot sitting on a low yew at the end of the hedge.  A garden version of a newel post at the end of a balastrade.

With all four of the conduit pots in the carriage house for the Winter, the long axis of the garden is more quiet.  And with the brush raked—tomorrow I promise—the gentle Winter collapse of the beds on either side is, actually, a nice contrast.  Order and geometry flanked by Winter-induced chaos.



But look again at the garden with the four (well three) conduits in place.



Those four pots make a rectangle; right now there're piles of brush at the center of it.  But in the Summer, lots of pots are grouped around a big tender tree.



The center group and the four conduit pots set up an energy field, so to speak:  They section-out some of the long axis, so it isn't just a long axis.  It's a series of more human-scaled set-pieces.

If I stand at about the center of the conduit-pot rectangle—where the tropical tree and the pots are grouped in the Summer—and at look East, I'm facing back to the house.


Between me and the house is a rose pergola spanning the axis like a huppah.  And forty feet in back of that, the French doors into room at the heart of the house: the center hall with the huge fireplace.  It all lines up, from the chimney right on out into the garden.

Facing West, back the other way, there's some year-round shrubbery topped in the Summer that incredible white-agave thing called a furcraea.



With the furcraea in the greenhouse for the Winter, you can see that the grass beyond it widens way out to make room for the reflecting pool.  Seventy feet long, but only as wide as the grass of the axis.







In the snowy part of Winter, the young sequoia at the end is at its strongest reveal. (When the sequoia is seventy feet tall, we won't have to worry that it will show up year-round.)

With the center chimney to start, the rose pergola "huppah" as the first pause, and the furcraea the last pause before the big Reflecting Pool garden and the climactic sequoia beyond it, the quartet of conduit pots is the mid-point of the garden's biggest journey.  So it's the center everything.  And as such, that center needed some serious demarcation.

It wasn't enough that there's also a cross-pathway through the conduit-rectangle's center point, leading to the North, to the carriage house...



...and to the south, to a free-standing wisteria that will, in time, be backed by a ten-foot hedge of American holly.



But with the bulk and billow of the gardens themselves in warm weather, you don't notice this crosswalk until you're right at its crossing.  (Which is great: it's a discovery, a surprise.)  But in itself it can't help "center" the axis as you look down it.

I needed some other kind of marker for that center, that says, without a doubt: You Are Here.  And so, the quartet of huge, black, spiral-steel pots, looking like they're perched on yews.

And in the Summer, their shocking prehistoric-looking plants.



Pretty good, eh?  It's starting to look like the pot is, indeed, perching atop the yew.  And how about those annuals?  Solanum quitoense with variegated ivy.  Yum.

And early one particularly misty morning, the furry leaves catch all the dew and turn into spiny silver velvet.



Incredible!  But this is, after all, the center.  Respect must be paid, and why waste the opportunity?  Part of the thrill of a garden is creating the intense need to Do Something Right Here—and then going right ahead and Doing it.

But this being New England, not California, the shocking prehistoric-looking plants are only annuals, and the pots themselves will last the longest when they enjoy five months—mid-December through mid-May—out of the cold weather.

Through the long Winter and even into early Spring, then, the conduit pots are gone.  The long axis is "just" a long axis, with only length to recommend it.



But at almost 500 feet, house-to-sequoia, length is its own thrill.

Wooly Mullein

With temps in the low Twenties even during the day, the puzzle is why any plant that isn't obviously a deep-woods-Winter-loving holly or pine tree would stick around.  Like this patch of young mullein rosettes.



Leaves a foot long, velvet-fuzzy and as juicy as lettuce.  Why bother keeping them green and healthy now, taking it on the chin day by day, month by month, from December to the return of sane weather in April?  Why not just pack it in, drop your leaves, and call in sick until Spring?
How can this be a fight that's worth fighting?


And indeed, here in a Northern garden, the mullein's stalwart and even, well, stupid persistence doesn't make sense.  Instead of dropping the leaves when frost comes, like something sensible and decisive like a maple, the mullein leaves are out there all Winter long, getting beaten up, beaten down, and beaten back until by early Spring only the tiniest ones at the very center are still green, still viable.

Remarkably, despite the carnage, the plant itself lives over the Winter just fine—mulleins are generally quite hardy.  This one is Verbascum thapsiforme, and it's fine down to Twenty Below.  But because it will, literally, live to see another day, it seems particularly pointless to keeping the increasingly-bedraggled and destroyed leaves day by day through the Winter.  Just drop these, and grow fresh ones when the livin' is easy.

One key to the puzzle is that, with days only into the 20's (and who can imagine the nights), the leaves aren't just persisting with dread and with increasing injury.  To the contrary, they look proud and even happy.  So far at least, Winter hasn't yet sullied them a bit.  They're completely able to handle deep freezes and even snow.

And that newest foliage?



It's the hardiest of all, lasting almost untouched right through to Spring.  And the second the weather is the least bit permitting—warmth per se isn't needed just reliably above freezing is all—the entire rosette mushrooms into action.  With that new foliage leading the charge, the leaves become gigantic, smothering any potential surrounding competitors before they've even germinated.

So:  This plant is completely hardy through a "real" Winter, and it's quite unfazed by mild ones, and would seemingly grow right through them if given the chance.  And while it tolerates the Summer heat as well as drought, it seems to truly thrive in cooler weather.

"Mild" Winter is the answer:  Verbascums are usually from climates where Winters are (by New England standards) just wet and raw, not deep-frozen.  Occasional frost, a few days of snow now and then?  No problem.  They've soon given way to cool weather and plenty of moisture.  And that's fine growing weather, especially considering the real yearly torture to come: Summer.  Drier and drier, hotter and hotter.  Thank goodnesss the verbascum's titanic flower spike is basically erected in the still-tolerable Spring.  In Summer all that has to happen is the flowering and the setting of the seeds.

Of course, home base for a verbascum would be anywhere at all around the Mediterranean.  And once they had this wet-Winter growing season / dry-Summer dormancy cycle perfected, the verbascums would inevitably spread farther and farther away from the comparative moderation right around the sea.  Mile by mile away, up in the mountains where it was colder because of the altitude, or farther and farther inland where it was cold because the warm Mediterranean water wasn't at hand, or just plain farther and farther North, where even the water was colder too.

In all cases, the verbascum was spreading where its preferred mild-and-wet Winter growing season got icier and icier and therefore dicier and dicier.  But on three crucial accounts, that wasn't a problem:  First, even if Winter is solid ice, Fall is still the wet-and-mild weather the verbascums make the best use of.  And so is Spring.

Second, in harder and harder climates, the longer and longer Winter didn't mean shorter Falls or Springs, it means a shorter Summer.  Which is the verbascum's heading-into-dormancy season anyway.

And third, even if just by fluke, the verbascum was hardy enough to survive the deep-freeze Winters.  (Thapsiforme, as I say, will take down to Minus Twenty.  That's Montreal folks.)  So that a real Winter would interrupt its preferred mild-Winter growing season?  Tedious but not serious.

And so not-serious that the verbascum has never needed to do anything different to cope with a Winter that's tediously harsh, but ultimately not serious.  Why make a big change in lifestyle—by dropping your leaves soon into hard frost—if you don't have to?

And indeed, the verbascum doesn't have to at all.  In it's own plant-brain way, it just doesn't care, doesn't need to care.  And it would be a fool if it is.  Right now, whatever happens to the Fall leaves happens; Spring will be here soon enough, and by staying at least moderately alert and at the ready, the verbascum beats any of the neighbors when the weather breaks and even the wusses like, oh, hostas, would think about poking a nose above ground.  If you're near a verbascum and you think like a hosta, you're screwed even though it's only April.

So my verbascum patch, which at first seemed like Winter had caught it with its pants down?  Don't worry at all.  Pants down or not, the verbascums will do just fine.  They aren't disadvantaged by their lack of interest in going dormant for the Winter.   (Or by having their pants down either.)  Their dis-ability to drop their leaves isn't a disability at all.  They're like Arnold:  They're so tough they don't need to be concerned about Winter.  Dropping leaves just because it's a little cold out?  That's for wusses.  For perennials that are wusses, for perennials that are, perennially, wusses.  For perennials that are—what did Arnold call them?—girlie men.

Verbascums:  Arnold all the way.

Wooly Mullein

With temps in the low Twenties even during the day, the puzzle is why any plant that isn't obviously a deep-woods-Winter-loving holly or pine tree would stick around.  Like this patch of young mullein rosettes.



Leaves a foot long, velvet-fuzzy and as juicy as lettuce.  Why bother keeping them green and healthy now, taking it on the chin day by day, month by month, from December to the return of sane weather in April?  Why not just pack it in, drop your leaves, and call in sick until Spring?
How can this be a fight that's worth fighting?


And indeed, here in a Northern garden, the mullein's stalwart and even, well, stupid persistence doesn't make sense.  Instead of dropping the leaves when frost comes, like something sensible and decisive like a maple, the mullein leaves are out there all Winter long, getting beaten up, beaten down, and beaten back until by early Spring only the tiniest ones at the very center are still green, still viable.

Remarkably, despite the carnage, the plant itself lives over the Winter just fine—mulleins are generally quite hardy.  This one is Verbascum thapsiforme, and it's fine down to Twenty Below.  But because it will, literally, live to see another day, it seems particularly pointless to keeping the increasingly-bedraggled and destroyed leaves day by day through the Winter.  Just drop these, and grow fresh ones when the livin' is easy.

One key to the puzzle is that, with days only into the 20's (and who can imagine the nights), the leaves aren't just persisting with dread and with increasing injury.  To the contrary, they look proud and even happy.  So far at least, Winter hasn't yet sullied them a bit.  They're completely able to handle deep freezes and even snow.

And that newest foliage?



It's the hardiest of all, lasting almost untouched right through to Spring.  And the second the weather is the least bit permitting—warmth per se isn't needed just reliably above freezing is all—the entire rosette mushrooms into action.  With that new foliage leading the charge, the leaves become gigantic, smothering any potential surrounding competitors before they've even germinated.

So:  This plant is completely hardy through a "real" Winter, and it's quite unfazed by mild ones, and would seemingly grow right through them if given the chance.  And while it tolerates the Summer heat as well as drought, it seems to truly thrive in cooler weather.

"Mild" Winter is the answer:  Verbascums are usually from climates where Winters are (by New England standards) just wet and raw, not deep-frozen.  Occasional frost, a few days of snow now and then?  No problem.  They've soon given way to cool weather and plenty of moisture.  And that's fine growing weather, especially considering the real yearly torture to come: Summer.  Drier and drier, hotter and hotter.  Thank goodnesss the verbascum's titanic flower spike is basically erected in the still-tolerable Spring.  In Summer all that has to happen is the flowering and the setting of the seeds.

Of course, home base for a verbascum would be anywhere at all around the Mediterranean.  And once they had this wet-Winter growing season / dry-Summer dormancy cycle perfected, the verbascums would inevitably spread farther and farther away from the comparative moderation right around the sea.  Mile by mile away, up in the mountains where it was colder because of the altitude, or farther and farther inland where it was cold because the warm Mediterranean water wasn't at hand, or just plain farther and farther North, where even the water was colder too.

In all cases, the verbascum was spreading where its preferred mild-and-wet Winter growing season got icier and icier and therefore dicier and dicier.  But on three crucial accounts, that wasn't a problem:  First, even if Winter is solid ice, Fall is still the wet-and-mild weather the verbascums make the best use of.  And so is Spring.

Second, in harder and harder climates, the longer and longer Winter didn't mean shorter Falls or Springs, it means a shorter Summer.  Which is the verbascum's heading-into-dormancy season anyway.

And third, even if just by fluke, the verbascum was hardy enough to survive the deep-freeze Winters.  (Thapsiforme, as I say, will take down to Minus Twenty.  That's Montreal folks.)  So that a real Winter would interrupt its preferred mild-Winter growing season?  Tedious but not serious.

And so not-serious that the verbascum has never needed to do anything different to cope with a Winter that's tediously harsh, but ultimately not serious.  Why make a big change in lifestyle—by dropping your leaves soon into hard frost—if you don't have to?

And indeed, the verbascum doesn't have to at all.  In it's own plant-brain way, it just doesn't care, doesn't need to care.  And it would be a fool if it is.  Right now, whatever happens to the Fall leaves happens; Spring will be here soon enough, and by staying at least moderately alert and at the ready, the verbascum beats any of the neighbors when the weather breaks and even the wusses like, oh, hostas, would think about poking a nose above ground.  If you're near a verbascum and you think like a hosta, you're screwed even though it's only April.

So my verbascum patch, which at first seemed like Winter had caught it with its pants down?  Don't worry at all.  Pants down or not, the verbascums will do just fine.  They aren't disadvantaged by their lack of interest in going dormant for the Winter.   (Or by having their pants down either.)  Their dis-ability to drop their leaves isn't a disability at all.  They're like Arnold:  They're so tough they don't need to be concerned about Winter.  Dropping leaves just because it's a little cold out?  That's for wusses.  For perennials that are wusses, for perennials that are, perennially, wusses.  For perennials that are—what did Arnold call them?—girlie men.

Verbascums:  Arnold all the way.