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.

Daylilies are essential with their hardiness, ease of culture, intensity and size of colorful bloom, and season of bloom that is beyond the initial May and June crush. So it's with excitement as well as some pique that, only in this its third year in the ground, has this one, 'Carolicolossal', finally started into bloom.
But to the positive first: It is in bloom, and aren't they terrific? (OK, isn't it terrific? Maybe someday, one of these years, there will be another blossom, and another. Or even—I'm not afraid to dream big—a few flowers simultaneously.) If I hadn't planted the darned thing in such an important place—at the near-to-the-house start of the central spine of grass that's the center, the runway, of the entire property—I'd be merely pleased to see the flower. But there's a lot riding on Cardiocolossal. It needs to look like it needs such prominence, that it expects it. And each Summer that it wasn't in bloom, yet again, called into question its suitability for grandeur, my judgment in selecting it for the role, or (even more humiliating) my ability to grow something as bullet-proof as a daylily to blooming maturity. So Hallelujah! It's old enough to bloom. I am a competent gardener. And as it produces more and more blossoms as a bigger and bigger colony, it will, literally, grow into its role as Start Of The Runway.
And what a starter it is: Enormous spider flowers up to ten inches across, and with no variation in color tip to heart. The deep trumpet portion of daylily flowers are so often radically different in color from the outer reaches of the petals that, in reverse of the norm where coloristic variety is a plus, here it's homogeneity that's the shocker. And because the runway is full of traffic, of admirers, for more than the single month a normal daylily would be in bloom, Carolicolossal is (supposed to be) a rebloomer, with an entire second crop later in the Summer. It's one thing to be a star when everyone expects your performance, quite another when most people wouldn't have had a clue. But why was the road to floral maturity so long? I've had daylilies bloom two months after being planted, for heaven's sake. Carolicolossal is just revving up in its third year. It's a sunny spot, good soil, plenty of water. no predators. What gives? My only thought is that, as usual in a garden where More is Usually More, there was and is plenty of nearby competition. The variegated helianthus 'Lorraine Sunshine' at the left. (What a gift, completely accidental believe me, that its flowers are exactly the same color.) In back (trust me) is a hardy bush jasmine that is not the usual one, Jasminum nudiflorm. Jasminum fruticans, thank you. Who knows what it does besides grow narrow green leaves (which is why it's hardly noticeable in this picture). It's a jasmine, growing happily in New England. And in front, the low needly mound of Picea abies 'Vermont Gold', which I hope and expect will flow outward and onward as a foot-high gold avalanche three, five, eight feet across, out of the bed and onto the lawn of the runway itself.
It would take quite a daylily to assume the role of Diana Ross by making these three other interesting plants mere Supremes in the process. Carolicolossal, you may yet be up to it. I'm finally hopeful.

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.

Today, at last and finally, I am unimpeachably sophisticated: My deinanthe is in bloom.

And deinanthes are the ne plus ultra of cool.
First, they are hydrangea cousins, and in the hierarchy of garden taste hydrangea cousins are far more important than hydrangeas themselves, whose ease of cultivation, availability, and—perhaps worst of all—unashamedly big and noticeable flowers mark them as likely favorites of children, neophytes, and peasants everywhere. Which they are. (Nonetheless I plant a lot of hydrangeas in my own gardens and my clients'; we'll get to The Unforgiveables in another post.)
As I say, though, the blooms of hydrangea cousins are generally more subtle then, uh, garden-variety hydrangeas, so they are more boring for children, neophytes, peasants and not a few clients. And so they are the province of fellow plant geeks, who are at pains never to be mistaken for any of those other folks.
Deinanthe, then, is the perfect taste marker, the perfect gauntlet thrown casually to the ground. And so beware, Philistines: You are now in the presence of a subtle aesthetic. Not only is deinanthe a hydrangea cousin, it's an herbaceous one. (Bush hydrangeas? So common, so, well, bushy.) And it's native to Japan. (Native plants? Such a convenient bandwagon for xenophobes and the timidly political-correct.) It requires part-shade and good moisture. (Full sun? So blatant. Self-reliance and drought-resistance? For those who are serious enough to make the commitment for regular care.) And best of all, almost: The flowers don't even face up.
They droop more reticently than a perfect Victorian child that looks shyly to the ground, one immaculate finger touched to the cheek. Flowers you can actually see without stooping and gently tipping one face-up, like Cary Grant putting his finger under Tippi Hedren's chin so he can look her in the eyes?
The effrontery, the moral laxity. Flowers should dip respectfully until summoned.
And now best of all: The flowers are sort-of-blue. Not a deep blue. (Too obvious.) A pale pearly blue, shading lighter here and, a bit, darker there.
Oh yes: The foliage. Large-ish and (now that you think of it) hydrangea-like indeed, although instead of the one point at the end, there are two. But just a mid-green, in truth. And not large enough to be make a name as one of the cherished Big Foliage perennials (which we'll get too in time) that sophisticates also cleave too. (In the case of dienanthe: Big Foliage? So simplistic, so at-a-glance. In the case of the other Big Foliage: So NOT the ferns and ferny wannabes that people who aren't yet secure in their Ultimate Taste yearn for to assure everyone that they are, in fact, Tasteful.)
And I forgot: The name. Deinanthe caerulea. First word first, pronounced "die-NAN-thee". Uncommon indeed, not one of the usual suspects, English, French, Italian, or German. Not even Latin. Tut tut, children: It's Greek, and it means (somehow) that the flowers are unusually large. Well bully for that. Some of us knew it was Greek from the sounds alone, because we have that worldly-wise ear for foreign languages even though, like EF Benson's Lucia, we usually can't manage more than a phrase or three in any of them. No matter: We just know, and that's what counts. And the second name doesn't let us down either: Caerulea; pronounced "suh-RULE-ee-uh", and referring (of course) to the complex and literate "caerulean" blue. Not sky blue, not robin's egg, not sea-blue, not even delphinium blue. Not, in fact, any kind of blue you could identify with a simple word in English. Ah, caerulean blue. It's Latin of course. Even the repetition of "oo"—"suh-ROO-lee-un BLOO"—so satisfying in a pursed-lip, not-smiling way. There you have it: Rarity, tempermentalness, subtlety, difficult (for some) to pronounce: Deinanthe caerulea is an orgy of discretion, a multi-lingual profusion of exclusionary detail. Heaven!

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!

If Giacometti had designed perennials instead of sculpture,
this would be one of his greatest:
Asian burnet is so distinctive, to elongatedly elegant, that I have it right by the path to my back door: It's a star, worthy of such prime real estate. Strong straight-arrow, nearly leafless flower stems shoot up almost five feet.
They filigree the foreground, so are the perfect front detail to embellish long-distance views.
The leaves themselves are almost all at the base, and they are a narrow ferny bunch. (The latin is Sanguisorba tenuifolia, where tenuifolia means, literally, "narrow leaves". Think "tenui" like "tenuous" or "attenuated": all mean, one way or another, narrow, thin, stretched.)

The quirky pendant bottle-brush flowers are the Dr. Seuss touch.
Intriguing and even comical, they are the dancing levity atop all this startlingly-severe and anorexic geometry.
Normally in burgundy, pink, or red, this white-flowered form keeps elegance at least in coloring if not in habit. As with all the burnets, tangential pollinators like flies and small wasps are the chosen few, not the usual mainstream bees. Even here, then, the perennial is proud in its iconoclasm.

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.

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.

No really, that's the a good "common" name. Palm-like single leaves, erupting in Spring just like mayapples—but opening out to these cut-to-threads discs. Shredded umbrellas: much more descriptive. As ever, my question is how had I not beforehand understood that this plant is irresistible, essential, exciting, not to mention easy?
Not rip-snorting when it comes to forming a big colony in a hurry, true. But otherwise easy.
And so of course, did I plant it a decade ago? Then I'd have had a big colony by now too.
But no. Life is a series of humbling moments interspersed with some joyful ones, then some horrible ones. But mainly, humble moments. So I'm picking myself up and getting over this shocking omission from my own gardens. I've had decades of practice at the humble thing. No, let's not consider for a moment that a horticultural society is coming to tour my garden in a week. An expansive colony of shredded umbrellas like this one says (but alas, only to the cognoscenti), "Yes, I knew what this beauty was that long ago, so long that my colony is now this big, truly huge. But you?Your best hope is to start now. Even so, you'll never catch up."
Ugh: to be seeing the front end of Sixty and seeing that, truly, I'll never catch up. (Let alone facing that I'll be seeing the front end of Seventy by the time my colony of Shredded Umbrellas can humble visitors.) Humble humble humble. But after all, just knowing what Shredded Umbrella plant is, is in itself a victory. Yup, I'll keep telling myself that.

I thought I knew hellebores: Evergreen foliage, flat or feathery. Flowers in early Spring and sometimes right in the dead of Winter that are never less than intriguing and sometimes colorful too. And with veins pumping with Deer Don't Like Me, so critters don't chew them. Let's not ignore the affection of the snobs or the gratitude of the multitudes either: Hellebores are popular with both camps so I can ally myself with either as the moment demands.
And now I see that hellebores can beyond what even snobs can dream up, where rarity and foliage frisson turn the corner and—surprise!—head smack into Disneyland or is it Dr. Seuss?
What plant is this, with leaves so divided and so thick that they feel more like quills than frills?  In fanning clusters of up to one hundred a stem.  Looking like the explosion of a mole's green- fireworks factory.  (Hey, you never know what they're really doing in those underground tunnels.  That burrowing-and-root-eating business could just as well be a smokescreen to hide the real work that gets done down there.)  It wasn't a grass, a shrub, or a fern.  Was it some primitive rush or leafless oddity from, oh, high-altitude slopes of South Africa.
On Saturday's garden tour to Little Compton, Rhode Island, this was one of the plants that not only startled cognoscenti, it also roused their patient spouses and companions into "What is it?" attention.
As luck would have it, I had planted three myself barely a month before, so was able to exclaim with sincere enthusiasm as well as dead-on accuracy:  "It's Helleborus multifidus subspecies hercogovinus" and just to keep myself humble, I could add, truthfully, "and they clearly aren't kidding about those multitudes of 'fiduses'.  What the hell's a fidus?"
I see that "fidus" in Latin means loyal, trusty, faithful.  Dogs are named "Fido" because that means "I will obey."  Well well.  And I see that there's the multifidus muscle, with loads of parallel strands of sub-muscles, each "sub" connecting this vertebra to its immediate neighbor on each side as well as a couple of other near neighbors up and down the line, group after group, vertebra after vertabra.  Spines are much more durably flexible because of the multifidus.
Thinking helleborically, then, a fidus is one strand of something that "stays faithful" to another fidus.  On this hellebore, each fidus would be each quill of the leaf, a multifidus the whole cluster of them (up to 180 a stem says the expert),  so stiff they aren't likely even to wave in the breeze, let alone tangle in it.  Each stays near its nearest neighbors—and only them—but keeping its distance all the while.  No entwining or knotting up like worms in the can. Click on the picture, and then click again to really zoom in. Those quills may be joined at the bottom, but they are resolutely independent thereafter. Well OK:  Glad we've got that all figures out.
When you've only seen a plant's picture before, not the plant itself, the 3D presence can be—damn well ought to be—a burst of information and affection on a much deeper channel or much higher plane, for a more direct penetration to that part of the brain that says, "Yes, this is what you've been waiting for".  Helleborus multifidus provides that 3D thrill, oh yes indeed.