Focusing on Foliage (mostly)

Like many of you, I definitely need more hours in the day. I'm into the last month or so of mad panic before my book deadline plus regular work plus the gardens, and oh yes, the weather is NOT cooperating. Wind, wind, wind and more wind. Still, I work inside like a maniac for a few hours, gird up my loins and go out in the wind to do battle until it drives me nearly around the bend. Hopefully, the weather stabilizes a bit, SOON, please and thank you.

Despite my needing to do a LOT of weeding and still some dividing and moving, things are looking quite well. There are many plants in bloom, some of which will surprise those of you in decidedly warmer climates. These 'Spring Green' tulips are just coming into their own, and I still have other tulips in bloom here and there around the gardens.

We who are primarily landscape gardeners (as opposed to kitchen/food gardeners) get very excited and happy over flowers, of course. But I have been gently stressing the need to focus on foliage as well as blooms. Flowers are great, but they come and go, and if you have a perennial border where most everything blooms at the same time and has unexciting, lance-leafed foliage, it's understandable if you think you've got nothing much going on. But when you remember to add plants with interesting foliage into the mix, there's always a great show happening.

Happily for us, plant breeders have been developing great plants with marvelous foliage as well as cool blooms. I'm going to show you just a few things from my garden, many of which are new to the garden this year for one reason or another. Above is the tiarella 'Pink Skyrocket'. If you google this plant looking for images, you'll find plenty of focus on the flowers, but I think the foliage is just as attractive.

My favourite Jacob's ladder, hands down, is Polemonium 'Stairway to Heaven'. Mind you, I have 'Purple Rain' as well as 'Snow and Sapphires', but the foliage of this one just gets to me. In the early spring, I posted a photo that really showed off the new colours in emerging foliage; now, some six weeks later, it's still a stunner, though less there's less pink in the leaves.

This is a new-to-me Pennisetum, or purple fountain grass, 'Fireworks'. The pennisetums usually aren't hardy here, but I gave one to a friend of mine to see if he can overwinter it. Mine are currently in pots, and I don't care if they even put up flowers later in the season. The foliage is great enough.

My friend Rob Baldwin is determined to convince me that I can grow a Japanese maple or two or six on my property. This is a seedling he grew of 'Osakazuki', which is normally a green one with coral/pink colour in its new growth and amazing fall colour. We're interested to see whether this will turn more green as the season progresses. Oh, and if I can overwinter it or not. Speaking of Rob, he now has a blog for his business, Baldwin Nurseries; I'm looking after it for the time being, and it's a work in progress, of course, but please do come and visit.

I like the juxtaposition of the somewhat climate-delicate Japanese maple with this particular specimen of Labrador tea, Ledum groenlandicum (or Rhododendron groenlandicum, depending on which taxonomist you listen to). This is from seed collected on our trip to Labrador in 2007 with Dick Steele; however, it's from plants growing just over the border in Quebec at Blanc Sablon, where the ferry from Newfoundland comes across. My buddy climbed a rocky, wind-scoured cliff to collect seed from the Labrador tea clinging to a very sparse soil, while I sat in the car holding our place in the ferry queue and had 14 conniption fits waiting for him to come down off the hill, preferably in one piece. I'm not awfully worried about THIS marvelous native plant overwintering in my garden, given what its parent plant was growing in.

Jubilation! I finally found a nice pot of Aster lateriflorus 'Lady in Black'! I've been looking for it for several years, as (ahem) I inadvertently dug mine up a few years back, thinking it was a wild, weedy species. Also known as the calico aster, this has tiny dainty flowers in late summer, but it's the foliage and flower buds that rock my socks. I will be marking its presence VERY carefully, so as not to lose it again.
I haven't planted 'Lady in Black' yet, and I might just plant her behind Campanula 'Dickson's Gold' just to make another one of those striking black-and-gold foliage displays that I'm very fond of.

Ferns, of course, do not flower. They don't have to. Even the regular ostrich fern makes me extremely happy, but the Japanese painted ferns are, in a word, exquisite. This is a crested form, Pictum-Applecourt', and as you can see the ends of some of the frond pinnae are crested or tasseled-looking. I only have a couple of cultivars of athyriums, but I can certainly see getting more of them in the future.

From the cool-shade environs of the ferns, we bounce over into the hot and dry rock garden where most of my sedums and sempervivums hang out, along with a few flowering things like several spurges, a lewisia, and prairie-crocus, pulsatilla, which is just wrapping up its bloom session. Although I love the flowers on the various sedums, I've mentioned before that I really wouldn't care if mine ever bloomed, just because I love their foliage so much. You can see a wee bit of 'Angelina' on the left-hand side of the phot0; then there's 'Frosty Morn' and 'Purple Emperor clumping sedums, and in the bottom left-hand corner, a semp I just got from Jane at Woodlands and Meadows, 'Sir William Lawrence.'

This is a new-to-me creeping sedum, 'Coral Reef'. The foliage is, in a word, gorgeous. I've just planted it and am waiting to see if putting it into the ground changes its colour much, as sometimes happens with plants that have been in containers for a while.

I have a number of sempervivums, most of which I don't know the names of, either because they were sold merely as semps, or they've got NOID/Lost Label syndrome. This one is seriously cool, because the babies are like little beachballs that roll down off the hen and take root in the soil. It tickles me to look at it. Some might say I'm easily amused. I'm okay with that.

Okay, fellow plant geeks, here's a mystery for you. The same day as I got 'Lady in Black' aster, I got my greedy little hands on Astilbe Color Flash Lime. And there was another astilbe with gold foliage at that nursery, and all of the pots of that particular one were mislabeled as a thalictrum. This is that mystery plant, settled into the shade garden alongside other astilbes, actaeas, trolliuses and thalictrums. I actually wrote to Tesselar, the breeders of Color Flash Lime, sending them a photo of this plant and wondering if it was the same one, just mislabeled. I heard back from them saying they thought the foliage was too gold in colour to be their cultivar, but to track it when it flowered. So, I hand it over to you: has anyone heard of any other astilbes with golden foliage? Is this perhaps just a Color Flash that has reacted to soil pH, or fertilizers, or cold, and gone more gold? Any ideas? I love a good mystery....