This Spoon Yucca comes from a seed collection in Grant County, New Mexico at 6800'.  This is a full sun, drought tolerant impressive piece of work when it is mature.  The flower spike can reach 10'-15' with thousands of packed creamy florets arising from the center of the well-armored rosette of narrow, bluish, toothed leaves.

A very slow-growing tree-form yucca from an Ian Barclay collection near Rodeo, NM. Doesn't need great age and trunk development to produce tall stalks of creamy white flowers which is good because if you are like us, you're buying ripe bananas. Ian is a font of knowledge on cold-hardy, drought tolerant plants.

Seed collected in AZ by FRBC botanist Dr. Cody Hinchliff, this is known as Owl's Claws, thanks to the long curved and drooping narrow flower petals.  Great for late summer color provided you like yellow to orange flowers because this ain't fooling around with its pigmentation.  30" give or take in a moderately moist sunny spot.

A Plant Select release out of Colorado, this is a vigorous and floriferous selection of the species getting 12"-18" tall and wider. This has myriad tubular, orange flowers that are hummingbird crack which flower for many weeks in summer to early fall. Low water needs, don't kill it with the kindness of rich compost. Another positive is that deer - ours anyway - don't like Penstemon.

A wild collection from 4450' in Eddy County New Mexico. With stems to 3', the tubular red flowers rank one side of the stem looking very refined. An unspoken secret of the very refined is their dense scruff of golden, decidedly pubic hairs just inside the throat. These catch and transfer pollen while keeping the flower's naughty bits hot, steamy and ready.

Whipple's Penstemon.  Broadly distributed on both sides of the Rockies down the US, this should be more widely available.  Most commonly with clustered down-turned trumpets of a rich burgundy to purple, different population can also be white or lavender.  Very pleasing in all of its forms, this is a good garden plant taking more moisture than a lot of the rock garden Penstemons.

Yellow Jacob's Ladder. A nice unexpected departure from the usual blue flowers of Polemonium as these are yellow with lacquered tomato. This little flowering powerhouse hails from the Southwest and northern Mexico and can put all it has to give into the many flowers so save seed and you can let it self-sow.

Seed collected by FRBC botanist Dr. Cody Hinchliff in Arizona from a summer rainfall area. Don't panic - this will still be tolerant of dry but will be more amenable to summer water than others. Wider than tall as it spreads by underground stems, the narrowly tubular scarlet flowers are a late summer to fall delight.