Kniphofias are one my Red Garden joys: the hot orange, yellow, and red spikes of flowers are unique in hardy perennials. And because the plants so often succumb to wetness in the Winter, they are oddities indeed here in New England. (I do some Extreme Mulching to get them through.)
This season, 'Alcazar' is better than ever, partly just because the clump is another year older.
Six spikes at once! The burnt-orange flowers, with only a bit of yellow in the oldest (at the bottom), are a vivid but not cacaphonous adjunct to the red of the nearby Jacob Cline monarda.
And the height and intensity of Alcazar is also great filler before dahlias (out of sight to the back of it) get going in August.
This is the sister clump, across the pathway. Yes: TEN spikes at once!

Butterfly "Weed" couldn't be more garden-worthy. Heat&cold impervious, drought-proof, immortal, flop-free, and guaranteed to bloom if only you give it sun and any (truly, any) soil, lean or rich, as long as it's well-drained in the Winter. Butterflies really do love it too. An excellent perennial, truly in the top twenty for sunny gardens from Zone 4 - 9. That's Minneapolis to Maine, Madison to Los Angeles: Most of the country!
Here's the species, with the typical uncompromising-orange flowers.
Yes, the picture is fuzzy; it's just a still from today's video on GardenShorts.com.
The plant, at least, is lovely without a doubt. But there's no getting around it: those flowers are orange. There's a natural variation in color, so watchful gardeners and growers have so far identified two named cultivars of different shades. 'Hello Yellow' is indeed just that.
This is probably far more versatile than the orange, coordinating happily but not loudly with blue, white, burgundy, grey, and any other yellow you have around the garden. Widely available—this picture is from the White Flower Farm site. But yellow isn't what I need more of in my Red Gardens. Neither is orange. Red, please. We want more red. And hooray! Here's 'Deep Orange Red' from the late (sob, heave) Seneca Hill.
It's so seriously redder than the species that the the name is too modest. I vote for "Yup, I'm Red All Right. Wadda YOU Gonna Do About It?" But with Seneca Hill in hiatus, where are YOU gonna get it? Perhaps you need to make friends with this great gardener guy I know all about in Rhode Island. Follow his blog even.

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.

My garden never met a mullein that didn't love it. Heavy soil, high water table, plenty of sun, smaller things to smother, larger things to poke up through, plenty of bees to service the flowers. Yep, it's verbascum heaven here.
Here's Verbascum thapsiforme, doing everything it does best.
The huge leaves of the fast-growing rosette arch out over everything in reach, shading them and, then, as older leaves tire and flop to the ground, smothering them directly. This plant is self-mulching! (Click the picture to see how big the plant really is.) I'll yank off the leaves from this rosette that would otherwise flatten the dwarf hostas. All verbascums I'm interested it are true biennials, with foliage the first year, a titantic skyward-thrusting bloom structure the second, jillions of seeds that germinate readily, and a quick death for the mother plant when the blooming is done. (Verbascums I'm NOT interested in? There are demure knee-high "pretty" ones that are easy to raise for flower shows. Too lady-like I'm afraid.) Verbascums pop up where they will; cracks between stones are just as appealing as open spots in beds. Excess youngsters are easy to pull; I suppose you could transplant them too when they are really young, or it's really early in Spring. But they are tap-rooted, so you'd need to move quickly.
Some verbascums—verbasca?—have rosettes that are in themselves a show, with furry as well as colorful leaves; we'll see one in a later post. But the point, literally, of verbascums is more in the architectural flower-spikes, which for me, for Verbascum thapsiforme, can get eight feet tall.
Here's one au naturelle; thank you Wikipedia. Blooming can start later in June, and doesn't finish until (can it be? I'll document this season!) Labor Day and beyond.

There is never a day hot enough, a week dry enough, for the performance to flag. And thanks to the fuzzy leaves, no one—insect, bird, deer, rabbit—ever takes so much as one bite.
This is, in short and in tall, the perfect plant for all sunny Summer gardens.