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!

Now that we're, uh, budding experts on pot look-alikes, this one is too easy, too crude by half.
False Hemp is a huge—to eight feet high, six across—perennial for huge borders like this one, or for to-the-front focal statements in smaller plantings when you want to razz the cops.
At a glance (or if you're toked up already), there is something druggy or at least doubtful about False Hemp.

The feathery pinnate leaves are attractive, you have to admit. But aren't they smokeable? Or at least a bit too "native" for proper gardens? I don't know about the smoke-ability, but they sure aren't those of pot, which (we now know) are palmate instead—all the leaflets attach at the same point, like your fingers to your palm. False Hemp leaves are "pinnate" instead: all the leaflets attach to a long central spine.
Well what about those buds? They're suspicious for sure.
Wrong again: they lengthen into a veritable curtain of greenish whatevers.
Pot flower clusters stay distinctly upright, unlike pot users of course.
(Thank you www.Crocus.co.uk for the pair of full-flowered pix. We can always count on our fellow plant-geeks across the pond to be up on everything possible in the garden.)
But one thing you are right about: False Hemp is native of one of those druggy "stans": Pakistan. Guilt by association anyone?
Another druggy muddle here: that common name "False Hemp". Hemp is Cannabis sativa sativa is , a close cousin of the smokeable stuff, Cannabis sativa indica, but without the active ingredient to make smoking it worth the trouble. Police take note: It would be self-incriminating let alone embarrassing to get riled up over datisca: Would you be thinking datisca were pot because you were so buzzed already you couldn't tell the difference? Or just so ignorant you couldn't tell the difference?
If ever there were a latin name to use with complete innocence, at full volume, it's that of False Hemp: Datisca cannabina. Say it loud, say it proud: "duh-TISK-uh cuh-NAB-in-uh". As in: "Oh that? That's my Datisca cannabina. Lovely isn't it? So delicate—and so under-used." And then, a tisk-tisk-tisk will let everyone know that you, at least, are up to the challenge of bringing this unaccountably scarce and rarely-seen plant to wider reknown.
Last off-kilter detail: Crocus.co.uk gives a common name for datisca of "Bastard Hemp." Leave it to the Brits to work in the improper heritage angle too.
PS: I myself will be using Datisca in my vast Yellow Borders, when the economy picks up enough that I can convince myself, let alone my husband, that another $50 K spent on the garden is just the wise decision to make.

Lily-of-the-valley is sensational to cut—both foliage and flowers—but it can be a patchy scroffle in the garden. Soil to dry? Too much sun? Who-knows-what bug is hungry? Then the foliage gets brown-edged and chewed-through. And besides, the plant goes dormant in Summer anyway, so even if it does do you the favor of retreating underground, then you're left with a weed-friendly bare patch.
LotV is great for an out-of-the-way spot, where it can be an ankle-biting cutting garden. Or as just a foot or two, here and there, in any garden you need to look at beyond Memorial Day. The plant's sheer persistence even in the less-than-optimal conditions that make it so unattractive, coupled (I guess) with the mooshy-romantic "Lily of The Valley" name, have made the species itself far too popular. Even if it doesn't look quite like you'd hoped, there it is, year after year. And you can still get an adorable bouquet or two from it. Lily of the Valley is one of our most cherished eyesores.
In gardens where you need to look beyond an appealing (to some) name, and bring a frank, clinical, even cynical judgment to bear on if a given plant is really, truly, worth a damn the second after the flowers fade, Lot V doesn't cut the mustard. Unless, that is, you grow this one:
From the moment the leaves spear-up in early Spring, they aren't just the ten-millionth Lily of the Valley leaf in your state. They are striped, and with rhythm and regularity. And, so to speak, a narrative arc: They start from the same spot at the base of the leaf, and merge into the same spot at the tip of the leaf. It's a controlled performance, with none of the wild-man cavorting of striated Solomon's Seal.)
The flowers themselves are (I admit) lovely, but they are a bonus not the only thing worth a damn about the entire plant. My colony is still young—I think this is it's third Spring—and I only sprang for three of them to start with. Controlled performances, with narrative arc too, don't come cheap. And it's already clear that, at least for me, this beautiful show isn't from a plant that has any prowess as a groundcover. Yes, the species can colonize so thickly it's a decent (but not great) grondcover. But striped leaves mean a more modest performance. It must take a lot of energy—and should—to bring narrative arc to each and every leaf. So I'll weed my patch of yellow-striped Lot V, and ponder if there's a tinier-still, but much more effective, groundcover it would consent to cohabit with. I need to respond in kind, and bring to it the controlled performance it's bringing to me. The gauntlet is thrown, or at least tossed. Let the games begin.