Once you've been stopped by 'Open Hearth', the next stop-light-grade daylily in your path is to the left, at the start of the south pair of beds of the Red Garden.
'Red Suspenders' is darker and, OMG, even larger than 'Open Hearth'.
 And I certainly paid for the added appeal: one pair of 'Suspenders' was $160.  

'Open Hearth' daylily is the first of my "Bodacious" series, not least because you can see it from anywhere.
Like fifty feet away, from down the narrow-grass "runway".
It says "Stop here! Look right, look left!"
Or through the sky-high Summer perennial show of the Winter Garden.

A 'Silver Umbrellas' aralia tries, without success I'm proud to say, to cool things down.

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!

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.

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.