The Mixed Border is a bed thirty feet wide and twenty-three deep. Big. If plants are a foot at the front, they'll need to be ten, twelve, fifteen feet at the back. Some perennials are that big and more—check out my Helianthus verticillatus.
But across the back of the bed it's just as much about shrubs and trees. Here's a variegated ash—what a beauty—that is, at least for me, so slow-growing that you can only see it if you're standing at the back of the bed.
That's the giant Siberian filipendula in back of it, i.e., completely blocking the view of the ash from the front of the bed. This has since gotten moved to the Pink Borders—the fluffy clusters of flowers aren't really the pure white you see here; there's a hint, a contamination, of pink in then was too obvious to ignore. I've just planted in its place a, fittingly, Siberian perennial aralia that's supposed to get even bigger than the usual eight or ten feet. So the ash will still need to double in size to be part of the front-the-front show.
Meanwhile, the ash's performance is no less thrilling for being, so to speak, private. Click on the pictures—and then again—to see its full intensity as well as the wider context.
I always plant Russian Giant cannas nearby; on a good Summer they get ten feet tall too. Their immense purple banana-like foliage is a vivid contrast with the comparatively tiny white-and-green leaves of the ash.
If anyone nearby is in bloom as well—like the PG hydrangea at the immediate back, with unusually large flowers, called 'The Swan'—that's swell too. But the show is powerful even if there's not a flower in sight.
Get variegated ash from Greer Gardens, who says that the tree is "A fast grower, reaching 50’ in height and about 25’ in height." How lucky for them! I'll prune mine, someday, to keep it shorter than, oh, 15 feet. At this rate I've got another five years or so before I get out the stepladder and loppers.

I'm the guy who paid $80 apiece for a pair of Hemerocallis 'Red Suspenders', which is a red/yellow bicolored daylily with eleven-inch flowers.
You read right: Eleven inches. (I paid $80 apiece for two of anything named 'Red Suspenders'.) So I can't be criticized as being one of those garden sophisticates for whom Flowers are a bad F-word, but Foliage and Form are good.
And good they are, filling out and brightening up the garden so flowers don't have to do all the work. Here's a dwarf Japanese maple, Acer palmatum 'Red Pygmy'.
Ferny foliage that says purple all season, and a low and starting-to-worry-me-it's-getting-so-wide habit. Fine and dandy in itself. But then with the variegated gooseneck, Lysimachia 'Geisha' pushing up at the front edges?
The yellow and green leaves are humming a jazzy but harmonious tune indeed atop the foreground of the Red Pygmy's tasteful dark ostinato of "ferny-purple-low, ferny-purple-low".
And Geisha has the typical gooseneck flowers, whose nodding soft-white cones are an echo to Red Pygmy's nodding ferny-purple-lowness. Vertical spikes of flowers would be too disruptive.
All in all, a lot going on, all of it riffing together. This plant combination has rhythm as well as harmony, self-evidence as well as second-glance subtlety. Yum!

So there I was earlier this week, on the way to see a client in Wellesley, MA, and I passed this huge colorful streetside show:

Trees with colorful flowers? Think about it: How many of them bloom early in the Spring? All those pink cherries. Those pink or yellow magnolias. Rosy-pink "redbuds"? Those lavender paulownias?


And then, the dogwoods come out, and so all the trees thereafter have white flowers only? Stewartia, catalpa, fringe tree, franklinia. Think about it: A tree that blooms later than May and doesn't have white flowers?


Only two, I think: Mimosa (pink blossoms, ugh) and the other one here on that Wellesley streetscape: Goldenrain tree.  Ugh, what a sticky-sweet name, and way too similar to yet another early-Spring yellow-flowered tree (Golden-chain tree, laburnum) plus a climbing rose (Golden Showers).


Let's flip over into the Latin:Kohlreuteria paniculata. Thank you, Mr. Kohlreuter whoever you were. "Paniculata" means that it has big panicles of flowers. Does it ever:

I had never gotten this close to the flowers before—get a load of my grimy man-of-the-earth fingernail!—so I was surprised to see the orange-red flare at the base of the petals.  The pollen is orange-red too—nice coordination!—and the petals are folded back to expose it completely.


Kohlreuterias in my experience are fool-proof as long as they're planted up a slope, even a tiny one.  They lose their confidence if surface water doesn't drain right away.
Sun and heat are welcome, and the trees are drought-proof too.   So tough they can be used as street trees.


We'll take another look at kohreuterias later in the season: As if these unique flowers weren't enough, they mature to colorful inflated pods by August.


In the Fall we'll confirm if the tree gets good Fall foliage.  The branching and bark are very satisfying in the Winter too.  A four-season tree then?  Very possible, and very essential anywhere (Zone 5 - 9) it's hardy.

The chrome-leaved Scotch elm is Number Ten of my favorite twenty plants: see the full line-up here.
I love this plant first and foremost because the hot-yellow leaves stay hot and yellow the entire Summer. No scorching, and (almost) no fading.
And also because the tree is so responsive to pollarding. Late in April, I cut all the branches that had grown up the Summer before...

... down to stubs.

Truly, an inch or less of I get the heavy stubs in the jaws of my loppers.

But did the elm falter, let alone fail? Not a chance: Six weeks later, the new branches are already over a foot long.

And there are several dozen of them too.
This is a tree of singular enthusiasm—or is it stubbornness? I massacre it annually, and it roars back, annually, with I'll-show-you intensity. These new growths will be eight or ten feet long by September, growing a yellow flame of foliage that's as dense as it is compact. (Unpruned, the elm could top eighty feet.) We're a good pair, my elm and me.

What the? OK, a lot going on here. That's yellow-leaved forsythia for one, posted about here. And the big-leaved bamboo is posted here. But what is the white-leaved action in the center?
Those are the young leaves of my Silver Cloud redbud tree. They unfold before their chlorophyl even starts developing, looking somewhat like the translucent seek-pod disks of the "money plant", Lunaria annua. Well, in shape if not in coloring.
Chlorophyl does creep in—otherwise the Silver Cloud couldn't grow—but the leaves remain satisfyingly "whited" the whole season. This is still a young Cloud, but it's a (small) tree eventually. So it will shade both the bamboo and the forsythia someday. Notice that there are two pairs of horizontal wires in the picture. They are the bottom rungs of a series of wires strung up to ten feet high.
I'll gently flatten my Silver Cloud to them so it will be a Silver Disk or a Silver Slab floating with tidy serenity above the wilder duke-it-out of the forsythia and the bamboo. (Yes, I can hear your exhasperation: "Louis, can't you just let something grow?" Well, yes, I could, but I worry that then my garden could be confused with yours. (Ouch.))
And also, the frame those wires are attached to had to be there anyway: It's a stabilizing end section to my Belgian fence of beeches. (I'll post about those soon not to worry. And yup, I couldn't just let the beeches "grow" either.) Further, Silver Clouds welcome some shade, and this was about the only semi-shady spot I had left. And lastly because I never heard of espaliered redbud trees, let alone an espaliered Silver Cloud redbud. So of course I had to try it.
And—right!—someday this redbud tree will live up to its name and bloom. The flowers aren't red at all, even the buds. A hot lavender actually. Check out my video here. The buds emerge all along the trunks and limbs, not just from the tips of the branchlets. So espaliering a redbud should produce a singular floral effect too.
Stay tuned.

Foliage foliage foliage. Flowers are fun, but foliage is where the garden's sustained interest lives. Plus foliage can be fabulous in itself.
Wrede's elm has small bright-yellow leaves on vertical new stems. Perfect for a gray day as well as a sunny one. You can let the elm revel in its inner-elmness, to become a big soft-yellow shade tree. Here's the lovely one at Wave Hill.
Pull up a chair, indeed.
What a warm beauty the tree is.
If you have acres to fill, not just a garden, why not plant a grove of Wrede's? Plant each one thirty feet from any of the others in a loose grid. And then, a hundred feet away, plant a purple-leaved beech. Or (hey, this is why you have all that acreage, right?) plant three purple beeches in a triangle a hundred feet on a side. Make sure the trunk of any beech is no closer than seventy feet to the trunk of any elm: You don't want anyone's elbow into anyone's armpit fifty years down the road.
For the next century and more, your gold & burgundy arboreal show will be famous.
But if you're like me, gardening on "only" ad acre and a half, you can keep the Wrede's shrub-sized indefinitely, pruning back each Spring. The new growth is particularly yellow, as well as vertical.
Here's my youngster, only this Spring old enough and big enough for some training-wheel pruning.

Any time I visit Avant Gardens, my heart leaps with anticipation: I can see their sensational dogwoods again. Sensational for at least three reasons: They are still rare, and so are a thrill to discover. They have indelibly memorable foliage. And (often) a striking overall habit. That they also bloom—these are dogwoods, for heaven's sake—is by comparison just icing on the cake.
Given how showy a dogwood in full flower can be, these must be powerfully ornamental trees to upstage even that exciting a show. Indeed! Here's the easiest: a variegated Korean dogwood hybrid called Wolf Eyes.  What a show! The foliage almost out-competes the flowers. (I'll see if I can return to shoot this individual in bloom.) The Korean dogwood's usual wide greeting-the-sky habit, heavily fluffed with white-edge leaves. It's an easy tree to establish if you can provide a mostly-sun exposure, decent soil, and acceptable drainage in the Winter. Then you can just stand back and marvel.
If you want to work harder and worry more, consider one of both of these two, which are worth the agita in that they are, if possible, even more thrilling. "Giant" dogwood is an accurate name for Cornus contraversa: Old trees can be forty feet tall and thirty wide—twice the size of American dogwood. Even the straight green-leaved species of Giant dogwood should be used more. It's striking tiered branching habit adds a remarkable layered look to a tree that's impressive already just for sheer size.
The variegated cultivar makes a great tree a stunning one, with bright mostly-white leaves in large tiers.
This one at Avant Gardens is just an adolescent, still thinking through that tiered thing. Older trees are showstopping, especially when backed by darker foliage that shows what is, eventually, a planar gap between foliage layers that's a couple of feet thick.
But you can't buy variegated Giant dogwood at Home Depot, and even if you could, you probably will have trouble establishing it. The tree is hardy to Zone 5, but when young (which is the only size you can afford to buy) it's mightily afraid of less-than-perfect Winter drainage, as well as drought and/or hot Western sun in the Summer. So plant it where it gets morning sun only, where it's definitely higher than the surrounding garden, and in generously rich soil. Water deeply once a week in hot weather, and cross your fingers. If it gets through the first Winter, you're (usually) safe.
(Another option is to buy the largest one you can find, and hang the cost. But woe to you if you still don't give it afternoon shade, great drainage, and good soil.) No wonder the variegated Giant dogwood is a head-spinner. It's alive! (And notice that at Avant Gardens its bed is, indeed, higher than the surroundings. And that the tree has some shade from an enormous oak to the back.)
A bit easier is the variegated form of the alternate-leaved dogwood, Cornus alternifolia 'Variegata', which at Avant Gardens is dramatically backed with purple beeches. It has a similar tiered branching, so another common name is pagoda dogwood. (Giant dogwood is also called Pagoda dogwood. So shop for the latin name, not the common one.)
This is a half or even a third the size of the variegated Giant. Twelve feet would be fabulous. In my experience, it insists on the same culture as for the variegated Giant, although because alternifolia is much much hardier, it seems to be more tolerant of less than perfect siting when young.
Either tree, then, is a triumph, an automatic star of your landscape. And yes, both of them are a bit of Mt. Everest to establish, and you may or may not be up for the suspense, let alone the expense of trying again in a different spot, and then yet again in yet another spot.
I've taken the easy way out for the moment, with an alternifolia cultivar, gold-variegated, called Golden Shadows. I'll post on that later. So far so goot, but wow is it pokey.