New and Restocked Plants

A very dwarf species Coral Bells with tubby little peachy white flowers on short stems. Ideal rockery or rock garden plant. Not often offered and overshadowed by its lab rat tissue culture Frankenbrethren, we like this a lot and prefer the timeless design nuances of evolutionary millenia over the hottest newest thing until almost immediately the hotter newer thing comes along and you are stuck with last season's big whoop.

The rarest species in cultivation havng only first been collected by Tony Schilling in 1966 from a small colony found in the Dudh Kosi Valley in Nepal.  This has handsome pinnate leaves and impressive light white flowers on stems to 3' or more.  This species just has a subtle different feeling about it than the other Asian species.  Very collectable.

A smaller very hardy Fuchsia whose smaller leaves and lax mounding habit broader than tall plays well with the numerous smaller narrow flowers that have reddish-pink sepals and a purple corolla.  This little guy - or to be fair, this could be a little Poc

2011 collection of this very attractive species from Dragon's Tooth in Lao Cai, Vietnam at 1700 meters. This rare Mondo Grass makes good evergreen clumps with narrow arching leaves up to 20" long with showy lavender flowers with darker flecks. Any plant from a place called Dragon's Tooth should be pretty tough as well as bringing a bit of magic to your garden.

So notoriously promiscuous as to make a rabbit blush, these evergreen bulbous Iris family members are all about the summer of love. Embracing any bee that taps on its window bringing pollen from any nearby floozy flower, this exhibits a Bacchanalian moral turpitude that is either damned or extolled.  These are young seed-grown plants from one of our darkest Dierama so at worst, this will still be pretty good.

An Ian Butterfield cross between P. pleionoides and P. humilis, this easy orchid has large flowers of pink-lavender with a fringed lip and interior well-spotted in red with a beckoning bee runway of yellow.  Typical Pleione culture - the internet is full of great advice fir growing in containers and also fantastic in mild gardens where it will thrive in mossy logs and stumps.  Great drainage first and foremost.

Beautiful flowers on this selection from the Versailles grex of the cross between P. limprichtii and P. formosana. Large rich pink-lavender flowers with an expressive fringed lip invites you to explore the voluptuous inner hollows colored sensuously in orange and yellow. Why silk pajamas, candles and Bolero just popped into mind is curious........and not a bad idea.

Striking hybrid with yellow flowers, nicely fringed lip and interior heavily spotted in red.  We have seen one reference to this as being a hybrid between P. albiflora and the lovely yellow P. forrestii.  We have seen forrestii in the Cangshan and despite it being fall and thus no leaves or flowers - just dormant pseudobulbs packed into a rock crevice, we still did a botanical St. Vitus dance.  This has filled that void magnificently.

An intricate floral array on this selection with broad snowflake flowers softly imbued with a frosted lavender pink. The center of each flower is a white starry eye and the fine edge of the petals sparkle with touches of icy nibs. An aptly named selection and our thanks to Jan and Marty for upgrading our sieboldii offering with this and others.

One can collect hundreds of named cultivars of this Japanese primrose and not have two that are identical. This is an ideal plant for the OCD plant collector who wants to take a long deep dive - just make sure when trying to have them all that money remains to buy groceries and keep the lights on. White flowers flushed fuchsia with a reverse that is solidly soft fuchsia.  This will bring felicity to your garden.

The pure white flowers are shaped like Amazon took its frightening AI algorithm capabilities and looked into everyone's hearts and minds to find the universal constant of snowflake conceptualization and then went to its secret biological modification lab and 3-D printed the snowflake gene and went all CRISPR gene splicing happy to make the perfect primrose for the snowflake market. Putting on my tinfoil hat now.

This is regarded as one of the most beautiful of the poplar species and well worth growing if you have rich moist soil, room and a need for a fast-growing deciduous tree of substance.  Large leaves on  handsome frame, these are pale underneath providing fluttering highlights during the summer while coloring brilliantly in the fall.  An excellent choice for cold climates as this is good to Zone 3 at least since it is from the Russian Far East down to Hokkaido.

Seed-grown from a wild collection in Winston County Alabama of this unrivaled North American tree..  This has the largest simple leaves of any native plant - up to 30" long - and let's add the flowers as well which are 8"-10' wide and rarely to 12".  These fragrant soup bowls are white with rose-purplish bases and followed by showy big cone-like fruits from which red seeds hang by threads.  Seriously.  Rich moist soil sheltered from wind.

What madness possessed us to make this esoteric cross between the usual maroon flowered species and the white flowered form? Consequences of a very liberal drug and alcohol policy is perhaps the best guess. Unflowered seedlings which will be either typical maroon pleianthum, typical white pleianthum f. alba or shades in between. We can definitively say the flowers will not be blue.

Silver Spears. Very nice sculptural plant with inimitable form and color. This will get 3' tall or larger if supremely happy and the color is best in bright, light shade or at least not in hot afternoon sun. This is from the Chatham Islands in New Zealand and is hardy here in mild gardens and good against a wall. Below 25F you might think about tossing a sleeping bag over it. A great plant for all you folks sheltered gardens or who like to overwinter containers inside. `

Very rare Libertia - which is a genus in the Iris family - from New Zealand which was thought to be extinct until a population of 30 individuals was discovered in 2006.  Closely allied to Libertia ixioides, this species is critically endangered in the wild but gardeners are helping with ex situ conservation through cultivation.  Evergreen olive-green leaves to 15"-18" on a clump forming plant with white flowers and persistent orange-ish seed pods.

Hard to find in the US, this has yellow inners.

Heart shaped green marks.  Admire our restraint on the description.

Nice double with a good scent.

Outeniqua Yellowwood Or African Fern Pine.  An interesting conifer in the Podocarpus family from southern Africa which has made impressive trees with bushy, rounded crowns in California.  We want this to grow here and it will in very mild gardens until we have that one week of winter which keeps us from being San Francisco.  Things are changing though so consider strategic positioning for the future.

Lovely little Heather-like NZ native best grown like Empetrum or Phyllodoce here. Happy in part sun to light shade in a moist organic soil. Tiny white flowers are scented sweetly far beyond what their size would suggest.. Known first as Cyathodes, then Leucopogon and now Acrothamnus, this was in the Epacridaceae family but now resides in the Ericaceae..........Crikey!

Our collection from a plant with particularly good red-purple new growth where it was growing in rich soil moist soil in open woodland with a few plants of the rare Primula ovalifolia as neighbors.  This is groundcover with strawberry-like stolons terminating in a plantlet which will root where it touches.  Lovely thing with pale flowers above the bold foliage in early spring. The species handles the east coast as well growing in the Dronenburg-Weil garden in Maryland.

We have seen this species in the wild on multiple occasions and it is variable but all are first-rate foliage plants.  This particular collection is derived from the plant voted best broadleaf evergreen of the trip, excluding Rhododendrons.  Umbels of small creamy flowers give way to small black fruit.  While we can't recall every plant we have seen plant hunting, the memory of this is crystal clear.

Fern fans we are, fern experts we are not, but we continue to chip away at the imposing taxonomic massif of Pteridphyta in hopes of becoming somewhat conversational in Fern. Currently, we can ask the equivalent of where the restroom is and order beer when talking Asian ferns. This is a creeping fern with long, thin rhizomes ideally suited for weaving through shallow moss on shaded rock faces with small orbicular-ovate evergreen leaves.

A distinctive Vaccinium (Blueberry) collected by Jens Nielsen in western Yunnan at 3000 meters. Large leaves of serious substance alternately flank the arching stems and take on red-bronze colors when young as well in winter on the least mature leaves. No surprises on the white urn-shaped flowers or with the purple-black fruit which add ornament to an already interesting plant. We can only guess as to mature size of the plant but would think 3'-4' tall with arching and trailing branches to 6' or more.

A perennial species with yellow flowers on a low, spreading plant to 18" tall.  This comes from the cooler northern Indian mountains whose mild climate was enjoyed by the British in their hill stations.  When in flower during a warm summer day, this pairs beautifully with either a cold Pimm's Cup cocktail or a Mango Lassi.  First bit of frost will take it down but we suspect that with a overwintering blanket of snuggly mulch, this should be rhizome hardy to mid Zone 8.  Thanks Derick Pittman!

Grass Trigger Plant. Gorgeous and fascinating perennial found in Tasmania and Australia.  Tidy perfection of evergreen grassy foliage speaks to a refined distillation of Aloe and Agave and the unexpected flamboyant spike of multitudinous pink flowers is over the top. There are sticky hairs under the flowers which can trap gnats and absorb those tasty insect nutrients. The pollination mechanism is fiendish.

Large flowers with appropriate heart-shaped petals that are light pink on the backside and pale white-pink on the front.  This is a comfortable plant with no surprises and you will have a sense of easy familiarity each spring when this flowers.  No drama, no challenging colors, just a solid beauty of the sort that if it could smooch, it would.

This Lady has a lot to offer and the image of a Madam in a high-end Victorian brothel keeps intruding when attempting to describe those offerings.  Courting disaster on the precipice of good taste, exuding confidence without apology, this selection invites anthropomorphism like few others.  The rich pink of passion on the reverse, a chaste white on the front with pink-tinged petal margins awakening.