What an easy and effervescent shrub. With the hilarious second name: Ligustrum quihoui. That's "kwee-WHO-ee". Don't be afraid of going high-and-flutey with your voice on the "Who" either, almost like a one-syllable yodel. When do you have the opportunity otherwise, not least while speaking Latin?
Yes, quihoui is a privet—but it's the one to grow for the flowers.
Long fluffy spires of them, as white as astilbes but a month and more later. And, of course, gracing a privet not a perennial, so you can have your white plumes of flowers at, so to speak, various elevations. I'm training my tall and adolescent quihoui into a standard. It's well back in my Mixed Border, so if it's not six or eight feet and higher, it won't even show. It's high enough now, and just needs some time to fill out its head. (So do adolescents of every species.) Because this ligustrum, like all privets, blooms at the tips of the new growth, a serious Spring pruning (and the increased branching-out that it inspires, and the (somewhat) later blooming that results) is all to the better. Perhaps I'll grow mine as a pollard instead of letting it fill out top to bottom. Although I love how this waist-high twig is in bloom right through adjacent leaves of a Ligularia palmatilobum clump...
...a huge and high white ball of flowers is (possibly) even more startling than a huge white column of flower. Somewhere, someday, for a client I'll spec a hedge of Ligustrum quihoui: What an astounding show to have a perfect and dense wall of this floral display top-to-bottom, side-to-side? Wherever you plant your quihoui, try to have it close enough to see the narrow, almost rosemary-like leaves.
They bring an almost coniferous-like texture to a shrub that is clearly anything but.

First, that weird name, Lead Plant. Says the Missouri Botanic Garden, the plant was once thought an indicator of lead in the soil. Meaning what? Lead to mine? Or lead contamination, land to avoid? Doesn't say, dunno. As usual, Latin is better. Amorpha canescens. Amorpha means mis-shaped, in that the flowers are missing most of the petals their other pea-family relatives have. Just one here, thank you. Canescens means grey or hairy, which the delicate ferny foliage certainly is.
The plant is as tough it is adaptable, native from the Canadian sub-Arctic to the Gulf Coast. At home, it's a small-scale early-Summer thrill to puzzle experts as well as just-folks gardeners.
The profuse spikes of indigo-blue flowers are way too early to be caryopteris, which is the same size bush (a foot or two high and two or three feet wide) but doesn't bloom until August. But caryopteris foliage is simpler and a bit bigger anyway. As are the leaves of buddleia, the other possible floral look-alike. But it too is in bloom much later in the season, not by the end of June, and even in the dwarf forms is distinctly bigger and more erect.
All Lead Plant wants is these three things:
1. Lots of sun.
2. Good drainage in the Winter. 3. Freedom from herbivores, deer included: The foliage tastes great (to them) and is nutritious too. No idea of its lead content though. And all you need to do for your Lead Plant is to cut it to the ground without mercy in early Spring: As with caryopteris and buddleia, the flowers happen at the tips of new growth, so last year's isn't worth a damn.

I haven't been face-to-face with actual marijuana for, oh, 40 years. Tried it, didn't like it. So I was very slow on the draw in realizing that one of my vitex bushes is doing a serious pot imitation.
Here's the bush, putting out its lush eager Spring growth.
A foliage close-up. Look familiar?
And here's a shot of an actual marijuana. (Thank you, Google.)

They are amazingly similar, but pot has more leaflets than vitex. Seven instead of five. And pot leaves are two or three times as big.
But with pot, as with vitex, the puff I mean the proof is in the pudding. When the vitex blooms it gets narrow spikes of tiny lavender-blue flowers, not the odiferous buff-colored clumpy things of marijuana. OK, blue-ish with today's pot-imitating species, Vitex incisa. Perhaps this is the reason that if you only have one vitex, plant what everyone else plants, Vitex heterophylla. Here's one of those in bloom out in Wellfleet. Now that's colorful!
But you know me: If I have one of something, well why not have all of its cousins? So I grow Vitex incisa too. That's one of my, ahem, hardy passion vines, 'Incense', crawling through the vitex, and adding one of its flowers to the picture.
'Incense' is far and away the easiest of the passifloras to establish, and the flowers are are the biggest too.
Incredible. Sun in the Summer, good drainage in the Winter, and you should be able to get some 'Incense' in your garden almost anywhere in Zone 6.
A nice druggy coincidence there. The name if this variety, planted so near my inadvertently pot-like Vitex, really is 'Incense'. Just as incense tried to do with pot in real life (I'm told), this 'Incense' is trying to cover up this "pot." Even better: 'Incense' was developed by the US Government, who was trying to create a hardy passion vine with an agricultural fruit crop. But instead—you can just hear those dweeby DOA guys saying "darn!—all they got was a hardy passion vine with incredible four-inch blue flowers. That still doesn't explain why they named it 'Incense', though. Maybe they were smoking something that day? A thought.

Butterfly bushes usually bloom in Summer, at the tips of the new stems they started that Spring. So last year's growth isn't useful at all: After growth starts in the Spring, cut each limb back to the lowest possible pair of new leaves. If you're not horrified over how drastically you've pruned, keep going.
There's a butterfly bush that blooms in Spring too, and so whatever you do for your Summer-blooming butterflies, do the reverse for this one.
It blooms on last year's wood, so don't do any pruning until the bloom is well underway, or even finished. And while Summer butterflies often get huge amounts of Winter die-back, Spring butterflies are so hardy that their wood lives year after year, and they can get bigger and bigger: As big as a lilac, and usually much wider.
But since my philosophy is "Why let anything grow naturally if I could be torturing it instead?", I'm getting out the pruners to take full advantage of my Spring butterfly's oddball talents.
The wood is hardy year-to-year? Fine: Then I'll pick one main branch, stake it up, cut off the lower limbs, and—voila—I've got a small tree, a "standard" as we say.  A "standard" as anything that's trained into a ball-on-a-stick form that wouldn't otherwise grow that way.
The younger branches tend to weep, especially as they bloom? Great! I'll get the trunk high enough so that I can have a (small) weeping tree.
And the bush comes in a form with conspicuously silver leaves, not just the regular fuzzy green ones? That's the one for me.
Here's the progress, then, on my silver-leaved, weeping, standard of Spring-blooming butterfly bush.
I've staked up a center branch to grow as a trunk, but then, in the way of much in any garden, got involved with a million other things for a couple of years. Time to prune and primp and reveal what's what.
How 'bout those lavender blooms in three-foot-long spikes? Every garden needs more fireworks.
With the stray lower branches pruned off, the young standard's trunk and head-growth are showing nicely.
And as the plant ages, the number of branches in the canopy increases nicely, making a fuller, wider, and lower-weeping canopy. That's a deep-purple ninebark bush at the left-front, cut to the ground each Spring. It will get six feet tall by September, which is just how tall I should get the butterfly's trunk so the weeping silver branches will mix nicely with the purple of the ninebark.
That's a blue-leaved rose at the back, which will get big enough to form a darker background to the whole ensemble.
Give me three more years, and this will be stunning.
PS: OK, time to grow up and switch over to the Latin:
Silver-leaved Spring-blooming butterfly bush: Buddleia alternifolia 'Argentea'
Purple-leaved ninebark: Physocarpus opulifolius 'Seward'
Blue-leaved rose: Rosa glauca

Rosa roxburghii is on my must-grow list time after time.
The single flowers (hooray!), large and in pale pink (ugh), are the least of the appeal for me.
But by blooming, the bush shows that it's happy, which is its own satisfaction regardless of the aesthetics. For my money, this rose is essential for overall form.
It's a monster of a bush—even here at the Zone-6 bottom of its range—getting ten feet tall and fifteen wide. But the real value of that size is that it's achieved via canes that get as thick as saplings. And so the rose can be trained up into a small tree, as I've done here.

So-called "tree" roses aren't generally hardy this far North: the trunk is grafted onto the rootstock, and the bushy and blooming top portion is grafted onto the trunk. One portion or another always fails in a New England Winter.

A tree-rose form of Rosa roxburghii, though, is the same individual top to bottom, bloom to root. And the trunk gets thick enough (at least over time), that the tree can be truly self-supporting too. It's a unique talent in hardy roses.


The ferny leaves are a classy texture when the blooms are done.
The bush is once-blooming only—a plus for me but a disappointment for those of you who actually like pink.

I cut back any branches that grow too far outside the general globe, and I adjust the stake so that the entire structure doesn't topple in some now-that-global-warming-is-really-here freak blizzard or ice-storm. But in time, this tree-rose will be stake-free and on its own, proud and pretty.

I've planted mine in one of my street-side beds, which would never happen if the plant in question weren't a year-round asset. Look for it if you visit Rhode Island: Mine is the only Rosa roxburghii tree in the state.

One hallmark of plant passion is the hunger for the new—or put another way, the openness to an ever-larger world. Yes, we love what we know, the breadth and depth of it, but at the same time we are eager for the new. It's not a zero-sum game: loving something new doesn't necessarily mean we stop loving something old.
And of course, newness itself is something to love. We love a plant (in part) just because we haven't grown it before. It's desirability after we've been together a year or two? A question indeed.
Sophora davidii in this category for me. I hadn't even heard of it until a couple of years ago. Sophoras—and there aren't many sophoras to start with—are trees, and yet Sophora davidii is a shrub. With comparatively tiny leaves, and a heavy Spring bloom of thousands of small white honeysuckle-like flowers with a just-subtle-enough-to-escape-the-notice-of-the-non-serious-gardeners lavender-blue blush on the outside. A dense habit, and plenty of thorns. Very drought tolerant, very hardy, and in those respects at least, like a cousin of a hardy quince.
Mine is still small enough to keep in a pot until I figure out just where it must be planted.
Meanwhile, here's the much larger, but still adolescent, shrub at Wave Hill, already in full bloom because the climate is a week or two milder there.
It's showy enough for the man-in-the-street to notice. And the dense-to-the-ground habit is always a welcome change from the bare-kneed profile of shrubs like lilacs or roses.
And hey, those flowers!
Surprising enough that, for once, I wish I had a Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass in the house.
But it's saying something that my sophora is still in a pot. It still hasn't found a home in my garden. This is partly because I'm wary of planting it in one of my "regular" beds, which might be too wet in the Winter. And yet my special good-drainage beds are comparatively few—right around the dining terrace, basically—and there's not room for a bush that will otherwise get as large as any determined azalea. Perhaps the solution is to grow the bush up into a standard. A dense ball of that ferny foliage, four or five feet up on a trunk, frothed in Spring with the unique flowers: It would be a singular as well as small-footprint display. And pleasing all Summer long, when the terrace really gets the use. OK: The first step to a standard is to start staking. To pick the stem that will become the trunk. I'll think of where to plant it, and do that in Spring 2011.