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.

Wow, what foliage!
Not a chestnut, not a sassafras. It's a .... well, what IS it?
Firmiana simplex, a Chinese species very popular as a street-tree in Japan, and naturalized here the South. So it must be plenty calm even when there's heat, pollution, heavy soil, and the occasional lifted dog-leg. I've kept one in a pot for years for Summer display in Rhode Island. Here it was, a star of the shot in a Summer feature in Design New England. Click twice to see the photo full-size.

But here's a firmiana enjoying the cool life, right in the ground, in the East Village: Tompkins Square Park.
The green bark on young branches and even trunks is unique in sort-of-hardy trees.
The good news is that the tree is definitely and firmly Zone 7, which means NYC out to Long Island, plus the Cape and Islands and Southeastern Rhode Island. (Googling, I see it's also happy in the Missouri Botanic Garden. St. Louis is Zone 7? St. Louis is Zone 7! Who knew?)
I'll trial it in future Zone 7 projects. Hooray! But the downside of being Zone 7 is that Southwest Rhode Island isn't in it: The eastern tip of the North and South forks of Long Island keep the Gulf Stream at bay, alas. So my firmiana will stay in a pot, and hunker down, dormant and happy, in the basement all Winter. But a big potted firmiana—in Rhode Island, no less—is it's own statement. (And no, not because I let the tree grow bigger and bigger, with a huger and huger pot.) Why? Let's mozey back to those Japanese street scenes. (Oh I hope I have a picture from our Kyoto trip. I know this weekend!)
The trees are pruned back severely—you'd think that the entire city horticulture department had been taken over by the French.
And the trees were clearly handling the pruning well, too, in addition to all the other hard work of being alive in a hole in a sidewalk.
And so: being alive in a pot of Rhode Island dirt not that much smaller than the soil pocket for an entire street tree? Possible, very possible. And it's the pruning that makes it possible: As it limits the above-ground size of the tree, the below-ground part, the roots, are limited naturally.
It would be a thrill if the pruning also resulted in luxuriantly extra-large foliage, like it does when paulownia trees are pruned. To have these leaves twice and thrice as big as they are already?
That would be a performance indeed.