By Steve Chamberlain
Contributing Writer
My Monet is a dwarf wiegela cultivar. It has variegated green and white leaves with a rose-pink blush over most of the white. From a distance it looks bright and pink. Up close it is delightful with complex branching, small leaves and a really pleasing flattened vase shape.
Only once in 10 years has it required any pruning, and that was when two vigorous vertical leaders popped up and headed for the sky. I cut them off at the base and My Monet returned to being a stable dwarf. The flowers are dark pink and don’t really stand out from the foliage, but rather just intensify the rosy glow of the whole plant. Given that other wiegela cultivars range from vigorous to rampant in their growth behavior, this elegant dwarf just makes me stop and look at it every time I’m in that part of the garden.
Frisia is a yellow-leafed black locust. It is vigorous and rapidly becomes a medium-to-large tree. Mine is planted as part of a vertical wall of trees in a back corner of the garden where it serves to provide a vertical panel of color. Like the species, it is a messy tree. Branches strip off in downpours. High winds break off large branches. But it always recovers nicely and since shape isn’t critical in how it participates in the garden, these things don’t matter too much. The leaves emerge yellow in the spring and then turn chartreuse during most of the summer. In the autumn, the color changes to a rich bright gold. And like all black locusts and honeylocusts, it provides a light shade canopy so that shade-tolerant plants will grow under it.
Pink Diamond is my favorite hydrangea. I have planted three of them so they are visible through our windows, and I endlessly look at them. They are tree-form plants. Each fall I prune them back so that only a small array of branches remains at the top of the trunk. In the spring these produce myriad healthy green branches that bloom that same year. Large conical panicles of bright white flowers emerge in late August, attracting bees, wasps, flies, and flying insects I can’t identify. In September, the petals begin to turn pink and eventually darken to a nice rose-pink. When the color is just right we harvest as many as we want and bring them inside to dry and decorate the house for the winter. We have two other hydrangea cultivars that show this color change. Quick Fire is a bush form that blooms earlier with white panicles that turn pink, then rose-pink. The panicles, however, are much smaller than those of Pink Diamond. Limelight is the other hydrangea. It develops huge panicles of green flowers that turn white, then pink, then rose. They make spectacular dried flowers, but thunderstorm downpours often bend the panicle stems downward and they tend not to recover, making them hard to use unless you fuss with them during the summer to keep the stems upright.
Shredded umbrellas (Syneilesis aconitifolia) are delightful Asian plants from Korea and Japan. In spring and early summer, they look like a mayapple, but with dissected leaves. The upper surface is covered with fine hairs giving it a misted gray appearance. Like mayapples, they spread by short underground rhizomes to form larger and larger clumps each year. Then, a stiff, tall bloom-stalk emerges from the center and gets so tall it looks like it might uproot the plant. On the end, a cluster of tiny pink asters develops demonstrating that this unusual plant is actually an aster. I especially love them in the spring and often walk by to check them out.
Sorbaria sorbifolia Sem is a garden cultivar of a Siberian, zone two plant. The all green version is rampant and makes clumps 30-feet high and wider and wider each year. Sem is smaller version with orange-pink emerging leaves in the spring. For about a month, it is just a spectacular bright shrub in the garden. Eventually the leaves become green, but soon after, panicles of white flowers on long, thin stems emerge. From a distance, these appear to be floating in air. Again, flies, wasps, and all kinds of flying insects are attracted to the flowers. The one downside is that the plant tends to spread by underground roots and suckers appear all around the large plant. These are easily dug up and thrown out. Otherwise, it will get bigger and bigger in width each year. I tend to prune mine back to a smaller size every three or four years. Otherwise it is a spectacular, unusual plant I just love to look at.
Interesting plants in the earth enrich the garden experience.
