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 always thought that this delicate-looking, densely-growing, gold-leaved hedging plant wasn't hardy in New England, but then I saw it at a friend's garden in Stonington, even farther away from the mild ocean influences then I am.  Yes, it gets a bit of dieback each Winter, but it bounces right back in Spring. And she doesn't protect it at all either.


So, OK. I'm trying it in my sheltered Zone 7 Wannabe garden on the South of the house. Tall hedges to the East and West and South muffle the Winter wind, and the South exposure captures the height of the Summer sun and heat.  And one of my more tender Southern magnolias—Edith Bogue—is already thriving here.

So if I'm going to have this delicate Zone 7 beauty here in Hopkinton, the South Garden is the spot.


Hooray: The Stonington owner just gave me a branch that had rooted out in the soil all on its own. So it's in, and the experiment—Is it hardy here too, not just 8 miles West?—has begun.

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.

My hardy orange is in full flower in these cool April days.
"Cool" in both ways in these still-chilly-at-night weeks, thanks to the starry scatter of pure white flowers, so eager, so delicate...
...and yet arising from such a brutally spiky plant.   
As soon as their show is over—another week or so—we'll return to the hardy orange, this time with the big camera, the pruning platform, and even the loppers and folding saw: It will be pruning time!
Not "off with its head" time, just tidying and slimming, making the contours clear and the shape more, well, shapely. A day at the spa, not an assassination.

Flowering quince is the just-for-show cousin of the fruiting quince. (Which has very ornamental flowers too—in white, very helpful. But we're talking about its non-edible-fruit ornamental cousin right now.)

Flowering quinces are perhaps an acquired taste, not to mention touch: They are uncompromising thorns that will draw blood without qualm.


(This makes the bush wonderfully deer-proof, though.) But for the profuse flower display right in April, I recommend you screw up your courage and your thorn-awareness, and start planting them.

This is my red-flowering quince, in, appropriately, my Red Gardens. It's supposed to be the reddest variety.






(Quince are a diverse tribe, with flowers in white, peach, yellow, pink, and red So there's a place for one in a garden of any color.)

The flowers erupt up and down the branches in mid-April, clear down to the base of the bush. So quince bushes have, literally, a through-and-through density of display that is, handily, enhanced by branching that's open enough to reveal it. Plus the blooms appear before the leaves, so the flowers don't get hidden by foliage either.

And did I say how hardy they quinces are? Zone 5 is the norm, so everyone from Maine to North Carolina can enjoy them. Shade-tolerant (well, somewhat) too?

With a tightly-planted garden like mine, though, quince's natural urge to sprawl combines with all of those thorns to make A Situation.





It's hard to do Spring clean-up when you're also trying to hold thorny branches out of the way.


Here too, quince comes through: With the counter-intuitive mindset of other horribly-thorny shrubs like roses, pyracantha, and hardy orange, quinces just love, love, to be pruned and trained. The head-to-toe blossom on each branch suggests that an espalier would be really advantageous: You'd have blossom top-to-bottom then. A sheet of bloom!

Quinces can be trained with mathematical and even Asbergerish intensity and regularity, but it's easier (translate: less bloody) just to do an informal fan. I'm going to build a simple frame of rebar and wire to get my red quince vertical as well as two-dimensioned. Then I can weed and garden all around it without adding the additional red of my bloody fingers to the display. I'll post again, of course!