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An uncommon species collected by Steve Hootman, one of the best plant hunters of the modern era. Steve is the Director at the Rhodendron Species Botanic Garden and he found this in the Chinese Himalaya. Smaller and more prostrate than R. laurifolium. Greenish flowers.
Dog Tooth Violet. The European representative of the genus which contains our native Avalanche Lily. These have great mottled foliage and lovely flowers of an even violet purple highlighted by a throat touched in maroon and yellow. Frans must have been a bit of a dandy.
Dog Tooth Violet. There are no bad Erythroniums and this is near the top of the heap. Dark pink flowers are infused with a blue tinge giving them a wonderful lilac color and creating an easy shortcut to naming this cultivar. A star in the shade garden with nice mottled foliage.
This really would benefit from the heraldry of trumpets when it blooms since royalty does enjoy the pomp of lavish circumstance. But the flowers are such a nice fuchsia purplish pink with a red throat that the trumpets and all the trappings are implied. And with the same good mottled leaves.
Our native Fawnlily which grows from California up to BC. It is difficult to imagine having too many of these but judging from the copious self-sown seedlings in our shade garden, we'll soon see. Dormant in early summer so they aren't in the way. Pink flowers, leaves mottled when young.
Arctostaphylos afficionados Paul and Greg at Xera Plants say this is their favorite Manzanita which made it a must-have for us. Fits in the home garden and tolerant of garden conditions, this get just 2' high by 4' across in time. Rocking reddish new growth turns to blue-green. Pink flowers late winter. Drought tolerant.
This is likely a hybrid and we guessed with longifolia but who knows? Hybridity just means extra vigor and a better garden plant with fabulous big silver-crusted long leaves in showy rosettes supporting tall sprays of white flowers. Bright shade to morning sun is ideal. Easy.
Fragrant Dwarf False Indigo. An excellent plant for the xeric garden although not the best in sandy soils since it hails from good prairie soil in the midwest from central Canada down to Texas. Nice small woody shrub with erect small spikes of clustered small tubular flowes of violet blue petals and red stamens - whoa!
Leadplant. A native to the upland plains of the Midwest, this leguminous shrub has excellent textural foliage of small gray-green pea leaflets and quite nice terminal "antlers" of purplish flower spikes. The flowers are tiny but are clustered in multitudes. Good drainage, drought tolerant.
This is one of those plants worth the greenhouse space if you can't grow it outside which we can't. An evergreen vine from Chile where it is the national flower. Big waxy pendant flowers of typically rose red. These normally flower in late summer and fall. and we were entranced by beautiful specimens in bloom when we visited the west of Scotland in the fall of 2013.
Vigorous plants with foliage variously shaded in coppery hues and flowers that defy easy description. The flowers in mid to late summer bewitch with prism jewel tones of ruby or amethyst or rarely salmon which shimmer with an entrancing depth of color. This is a seedling group and not clonal so there is some small variation but pretty darned consistent.
Choice and uncommon Japanese native making a many stemmed plant with lots of white bottle-brush flowers in spring. The glossy green and nicely textured leaves are pleasant the rest of the season.
Collected by the late Don Jacobs from an especially robust population at the eastern extension of its range in in the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma. This eastern extension our native Western Stream Orchid will soon form a colony of flowering stems with small orange-yellow-brown flowers. Moist to wet rich soil - it's easy!
