One hallmark of plant passion is the hunger for the new—or put another way, the openness to an ever-larger world. Yes, we love what we know, the breadth and depth of it, but at the same time we are eager for the new. It's not a zero-sum game: loving something new doesn't necessarily mean we stop loving something old.
And of course, newness itself is something to love. We love a plant (in part) just because we haven't grown it before. It's desirability after we've been together a year or two? A question indeed.
Sophora davidii in this category for me. I hadn't even heard of it until a couple of years ago. Sophoras—and there aren't many sophoras to start with—are trees, and yet Sophora davidii is a shrub. With comparatively tiny leaves, and a heavy Spring bloom of thousands of small white honeysuckle-like flowers with a just-subtle-enough-to-escape-the-notice-of-the-non-serious-gardeners lavender-blue blush on the outside. A dense habit, and plenty of thorns. Very drought tolerant, very hardy, and in those respects at least, like a cousin of a hardy quince.
Mine is still small enough to keep in a pot until I figure out just where it must be planted.
Meanwhile, here's the much larger, but still adolescent, shrub at Wave Hill, already in full bloom because the climate is a week or two milder there.
It's showy enough for the man-in-the-street to notice. And the dense-to-the-ground habit is always a welcome change from the bare-kneed profile of shrubs like lilacs or roses.
And hey, those flowers!
Surprising enough that, for once, I wish I had a Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass in the house.
But it's saying something that my sophora is still in a pot. It still hasn't found a home in my garden. This is partly because I'm wary of planting it in one of my "regular" beds, which might be too wet in the Winter. And yet my special good-drainage beds are comparatively few—right around the dining terrace, basically—and there's not room for a bush that will otherwise get as large as any determined azalea. Perhaps the solution is to grow the bush up into a standard. A dense ball of that ferny foliage, four or five feet up on a trunk, frothed in Spring with the unique flowers: It would be a singular as well as small-footprint display. And pleasing all Summer long, when the terrace really gets the use. OK: The first step to a standard is to start staking. To pick the stem that will become the trunk. I'll think of where to plant it, and do that in Spring 2011.

My hardy orange is in full flower in these cool April days.
"Cool" in both ways in these still-chilly-at-night weeks, thanks to the starry scatter of pure white flowers, so eager, so delicate...
...and yet arising from such a brutally spiky plant.   
As soon as their show is over—another week or so—we'll return to the hardy orange, this time with the big camera, the pruning platform, and even the loppers and folding saw: It will be pruning time!
Not "off with its head" time, just tidying and slimming, making the contours clear and the shape more, well, shapely. A day at the spa, not an assassination.

Flowering quince is the just-for-show cousin of the fruiting quince. (Which has very ornamental flowers too—in white, very helpful. But we're talking about its non-edible-fruit ornamental cousin right now.)

Flowering quinces are perhaps an acquired taste, not to mention touch: They are uncompromising thorns that will draw blood without qualm.


(This makes the bush wonderfully deer-proof, though.) But for the profuse flower display right in April, I recommend you screw up your courage and your thorn-awareness, and start planting them.

This is my red-flowering quince, in, appropriately, my Red Gardens. It's supposed to be the reddest variety.






(Quince are a diverse tribe, with flowers in white, peach, yellow, pink, and red So there's a place for one in a garden of any color.)

The flowers erupt up and down the branches in mid-April, clear down to the base of the bush. So quince bushes have, literally, a through-and-through density of display that is, handily, enhanced by branching that's open enough to reveal it. Plus the blooms appear before the leaves, so the flowers don't get hidden by foliage either.

And did I say how hardy they quinces are? Zone 5 is the norm, so everyone from Maine to North Carolina can enjoy them. Shade-tolerant (well, somewhat) too?

With a tightly-planted garden like mine, though, quince's natural urge to sprawl combines with all of those thorns to make A Situation.





It's hard to do Spring clean-up when you're also trying to hold thorny branches out of the way.


Here too, quince comes through: With the counter-intuitive mindset of other horribly-thorny shrubs like roses, pyracantha, and hardy orange, quinces just love, love, to be pruned and trained. The head-to-toe blossom on each branch suggests that an espalier would be really advantageous: You'd have blossom top-to-bottom then. A sheet of bloom!

Quinces can be trained with mathematical and even Asbergerish intensity and regularity, but it's easier (translate: less bloody) just to do an informal fan. I'm going to build a simple frame of rebar and wire to get my red quince vertical as well as two-dimensioned. Then I can weed and garden all around it without adding the additional red of my bloody fingers to the display. I'll post again, of course!

Evergreen deer-proof groundcovers are scarce. (Think about it: deer will demolish pachysandra and ivy. Only vinca has potential to cover a reasonable amount of space effectively.)
So "Sweet Box" is important. It's congenial too, spreading slowing (yes, often too slowly) but steadily. (If you have ever had opportunity to dig up some, you'll be shocked, shocked, at the profusion of horizontal white stolons you'll expose. You'd think the plant would be spreading with the speed and ruthlessness of bamboo. We wish.)
Instead it's more like the Little Engine That Could. You plant pots of it, oh, two feet apart, closer if you can afford it, and they merge with the speed of a tai-chi group. If you worry about how they're doing, they don't seem to get anywhere. But then (well, a few years later), you've got a colony like this one at one of my client's:

If you spend a lot of time on your knees near your colony, or are just a munchkin, you'll pick up a Fall talent: pleasantly fragrant flowers. Hence the "sweet" box thing. (Of course, the plant doesn't look a thing like box, which has much smaller as well as rounded leaves, and doesn't spread underground either.)
The flowerbuds are in the crotches of the leaves. The display is all nasal, so to speak, not visual. You won't see that the bush is blooming, but (if you're at that low altitude at least), you'll sure smell it.
Oh yes: What a fun latin name: Sarcococca. It even sounds like the Little Engine That Could: SARcococca, SARcococca, SARcococca, SARcococca. The second name, "humilis", echoes "humility". The bush is unassuming and hardworking, with a low profile. Humility indeed.
Of course there's a catch: sarcococca isn't as hardy as we'd all like. Zone 6 only, and even so, you're doomed if it doesn't have great Winter drainage. I've proved this in my own gardens. I'll try again with sarcococca, but in my modestly-but-effectively-raised terrace beds. Even an couple of inches of raised-bed-ness can do the trick: Any little elevation will ensure that the water slides off the bed instead of sitting around helping everything rot.
Here in New England, sarcococca is Spring-plant only, so I'd better get cracking. Got it.