Now that my blue-flowered deinanthe is in bloom, I can relax on being cool or not. I am, and that's that. I can enjoy The World Of The Cool with a more casual knowingness.
I can wear my status with ease but also lack of fear. I know what a deinanthe is now; it's a friend, a companion that can be greeted with confidence and affection.
And so now that I can recognize deinanthe (and not just in the sense of identifying—yes, this is a deinanthe—but also in the sense of acknowledging, of giving respectable welcome into the world of the good and the quality and the hopeful—this is one of the wonders of the plant world, that now I have brought to happy reality in my very own garden) I can greet this gorgeous clump of its white cousin, Deinanthe bifida, with calm accuracy. And the knowledge that, Garden Gods willing, my own juvenile clump of it will also flower—oh yes, will flower, without question—in due time.
Yes, bugs may descend, unspeakable heat or cold may roll in, money may run out, fashionability may slide past. But since I've managed to nurture a blue deinanthe from starter plant to blooming maturity, I can probably nurture a white deinanthe to blooming maturity too. We all take calmness and certainty and security—delusional or not—where we may.
In advance of visiting my own fabulous white deinanthe, in bloom of course, in, say 2013, you can check this one out at Chanticleer, the peerless (and bottomless) estate gardens outside PHilladelphia. So worth the trip, and from anywhere.

Time and again I'm taking a look at the years of thought, effort, and money that can create someone else's garden. Most of the time I wonder how and why there are so few kinds of plants. Even when the owner loves plants and shopping at nurseries, even the more obscure ones where all the good plants are. How do they not choose to have more? Is it a very specific, even narrow, definition of Good Plant or Good Taste? Possibly. Hesitation created by unhappy experiences with trying different ones? Probably. Having a life that isn't centered on cool plants, at least not to the extent mine is? Absolutely.
Even so, how can they stand not even having the opportunity of enjoying the countless plants that even they, if they knew about them, would declare to be thrilling and hardworking? It's abstention that is, to me, incomprehensible. From their vantage, no doubt, I have no sense of restraint in my own garden, no sane grip on practical realities like:
If every other month I get yet another Quartet Of Something That Will, Someday, Look Incredible In Pots, eventually I'll need to find, rent, afford, handle an additional greenhouse just for them. One more espalier, then another, then another, and eventually I won't have time to give each the pruning and tieing-in it needs. Another kind of canna (dahlias I seem to be able to call a limit to), and then another, and then another, and eventually there won't be room in the basement for twenty more crates of overwintered tubers. One of the gardeners I'm most in awe of has plants each of peerless quality as well as obscurity, and many of them. (She grows her never-before-seen-in-this-Time Zone tree peony species from seed for God's sake.) And with here, there are always more seeds, more seedlings, and so, finally, the small greenhouse-like structure (but with shade-cloth instead of glazing) just for germination of said seeds, and hence (because she seems to succeed at everything she does) ever more essential plants to fit into her garden.
But although she has the room to add another bed and then another— and all without a weed in sight even she does it all herself, jeez it's amazing —she hardly ever does. And although she's also an astounding baker— no sane friend ever refuses her offer to bring desert to the dinner. Deeply flavorful, unflinchingly including every possible yummy butter-and-cream-laden calorie, perfectly frosted or crusted or crumbled or drizzled. A recipe that nobody else, just yet, had tried or maybe even heard of. In short, each desert is a revelation, revealed with flair (such a seriously purpose-built holder to bring the desert over in the car unscathed), "plated" with evident practice, and devoured with gusto —she's not overweight in the least. And neither are her gardens.
How, I ask. How?
Walking around the garden with her one day, part of the answer tapped me on the shoulder. Time and again when we were looking at plants that I was respecting and even craving, she would caveat, "Well I think it's about time to get rid of that one", pointing out some fatal flaw that I, with my (apparently) cruder blurred vision hadn't even noticed. Sometimes she was just acknowledging a change in affection; the plant was fine, doing well, but she'd moved on regardless. And by next visit, or at least by the next year, it was gone. Mattress-vine, which, it turns out, alas, I don't seem to have had luck establishing even in one of my most-favored spots, was an invading nightmare for her (and a perfect mattress- or at least footrest-sized pad), and it was ripped out with relief as well as enormous effort. "If you don't get every little piece, it just comes right back. I was on my hands and knees for a couple of hours with that one."
Her hardy crepe myrtles, which I was stunned to see thriving in wide-open-to-Winter-winds spots, and so crowed in excitement at first glance (and then bought for my own garden ASAP)? Gone. All the troughs of alpines? As a past president of the North American Rock Garden Society, not just the local or even state-wide or even regional Rock Garden Society—surely she had enduring interest in them? Gone. Editing, culling, killing—the essential balance to experimenting, acquiring, and dreaming—she's remarkably pro-active about it. I tend to yank something out only after it's already dead, and only after I've already tried to grow it a couple of times before too, with some years of coddling and willful ignorance along the way that, actually, it looks like shit even though, yes, you have to admit, it is actually alive. Right now, my experimenting, acquiring, and dreaming are out in front of my editing, culling, and killing. (Less charitably: my plant-lust isn't very restrained by my plant-wisdom. My plant id is on the loose.)
As with, here, one of the hardy orchids. Oh yes, some orchids can be grown right outside in the garden, in the year-round dirt of New England. (Yes, the other thirty-thousand species and hydrids are only viable outside year-round if you live subtropically at the worst.)
So to have an orchid in your garden here in New England? How can anyone resist? The shock is that I, somehow, have resisted until know.
I think because I'd never seen one, and so assumed they were shy frail little things. And ou know how little lust I feel for shy little things. But then I saw one in the pot at one of my favorite nurseries, Broken Arrow. And I had to have it.
Bletilla striata is the species, and it's the sane first hardy orchid to start with, primarily because it's one of the hardiest: Zone 6. That's hardy even up to coastal Maine.
Yes, it has actual orchid flowers...
...but for me it was the foliage.
Pleated, distinctive, there even when the flowers aren't. (Don't be thinking that this orchid is evergreen too. Not up here. But still, to have that foliage even during the warm months: I couldn't resist.)
Plus, this ground orchid is clearly no shrinking violet. It's muscling right through the pot.
It's the Incredible Hulk, splitting the pot wide open.
Cutting carefully down, what's inside only seems more incredible.

Writhing, questing roots and rhizomes. Wow!
This is a plant that, at least in a congenial spot from Zone 6 and warmer, is a fabulous thug.
Into the ground with it!

I'll worry about having two many hardy orchids another day. (And, oh yes, there are other shades and species to dabble it.) Right now, I've at least got this one. Thank goodness.

I'm the guy who paid $80 apiece for a pair of Hemerocallis 'Red Suspenders', which is a red/yellow bicolored daylily with eleven-inch flowers.
You read right: Eleven inches. (I paid $80 apiece for two of anything named 'Red Suspenders'.) So I can't be criticized as being one of those garden sophisticates for whom Flowers are a bad F-word, but Foliage and Form are good.
And good they are, filling out and brightening up the garden so flowers don't have to do all the work. Here's a dwarf Japanese maple, Acer palmatum 'Red Pygmy'.
Ferny foliage that says purple all season, and a low and starting-to-worry-me-it's-getting-so-wide habit. Fine and dandy in itself. But then with the variegated gooseneck, Lysimachia 'Geisha' pushing up at the front edges?
The yellow and green leaves are humming a jazzy but harmonious tune indeed atop the foreground of the Red Pygmy's tasteful dark ostinato of "ferny-purple-low, ferny-purple-low".
And Geisha has the typical gooseneck flowers, whose nodding soft-white cones are an echo to Red Pygmy's nodding ferny-purple-lowness. Vertical spikes of flowers would be too disruptive.
All in all, a lot going on, all of it riffing together. This plant combination has rhythm as well as harmony, self-evidence as well as second-glance subtlety. Yum!

Almost done with drooling over that garden in Little Compton, where the last three posts have all been GottaGets.
Chinese Mayapple is a fourth.

Look at those immense fat-star-shaped leaves. A presence in the garden that is prehistoric—and I mean that as high praise. I'm cursed with a vast swathe of native mayapple, which is common enough in general, let alone widespread enough in my own garden, to have long ago lost its charm. Ah the thrill of the exotic, though: Chinese mayapple, here I come.