Just Don't Go There

It has become apparent that one of the employees at my favorite local independent garden center has a habit of procuring small orders of obscure plants for the shade garden. Every year I find some new interesting plant way in the far back corner of the place. It's so far back in the corner it is basically their work area. I don't get into that far corner very often.

Today I stumbled across the Shredded Umbrella Plant, Syneilesis aconitifolia back there. That leaf. I must have it. I think I'll take two. With a leaf growing to ten inches across, it will definitely stand out in the Lush.

The Shredded Umbrella Plant is a perennial hardy to zone 4, good, and sends single leaves up from an expanding clump of rhizomes. The tag says a non-aggressive slow spreader. Well I can live with that.

I also bumped into a hybrid Meadowsweet 'Red Umbrellas' with a most interesting leaf. This will need more sun and Meadowsweet likes wet soils. Got that. Plus they have fuzzy pink flowers on stems rising well above the foliage. At 30 inches it is short for a Meadowsweet, but I think it will be tall enough to work with the Lush.

It was another umbrella kind of day, cold and windy with passing showers.

I've been watching some trillium blooms hiding under their umbrella of leaves. Are these the red trilliums that followed me home last year? They are in the right general location. Sure enough, they are red. This is them and they are an added new species, Trillium vaseyi. They differ from the red Trillium erectum that was already here by the larger overlapping petals. The color is also a much deeper red.

Now I wonder where that Painted Trillium went?

The returning transplanted trilliums were not the only thing I found when I got home. The new and improved weather diagnosis is suggesting a low of 33 and patchy frost. Don't even think about going there. I will not have it. Thirty eight degrees this morning was bad enough. I do not want to have to replant half the roadside vegetable garden. One late damaging frost before a garden tour is already one to many.

There are two suspiciously dead looking Deutzias next door in the ridge top garden. They have yet to leaf out and very well may have been killed to the ground like all the roses and butterfly bushes. They are both ten feet tall and eight feet around and may have to be cut to the ground.

I'm still cleaning up from the first late frost. I do not need another.