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.