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The Perfect Plant Catalog

© Carol Wallace

Well - I THOUGHT this was going to be easy. I had these big holes in the garden with nothing growing in them. I needed to fill them.

As any gardener knows, holes in gardens exist to be filled. In fact, typically each summer, millions of plants all over America go into gardens whether there are holes or not. Gardeners have this peculiar ability to be able to see space where average mortals see only packed greenery. Despite this, most gardeners usually have several plants which are still languishing in pots, madly hoping for a vacancy. Usually, gardeners pray for holes.

But this year I had real holes - major vacancies. Naturally, this year when the major shopping season was in full swing, I had pretty well reached saturation point in most of my beds, and so didn't do much plant shopping. So I had no stand-by passengers. (Well - to be perfectly honest I have three Japanese maples, a variegated hydrangea and two variegated azaleas, three strobilanthes, a coleus, a brugmansia, two foxgloves and a flat of ajuga sitting around waiting for homes - but my holes are not only in a full sun garden but also the wrong size and shape for any of these.)

I looked long and hard at those holes. What did they need to fill them to perfection? One pot needed something in a mounded shape with fine-textured leaves, preferably glaucous toned. The other also needed a mounded shape but with larger leaves to relieve all the ferny and spikey plants that would surround it, and it needed to be basic green. Easy - right??

Not right. I came inside and hauled out my stack of mail order catalogs, prepared to find maybe a dozen candidates for those two spaces. And, do you know what? Not one of those catalogs told me what I needed to know.

In the first place, I finally realized what I guess I've known all along, subconsciously - that catalogs almost never show you the foliage unless the plant itself is variegated and the leaves are the outstanding feature. All you see of most plants is the flower - in closeup and often out of context so that what appears to be a large daisy in the photo turns out to be a spidery little thing half an inch across on the actual plant. The flower pictured here is, believe it or not, a hosta flower - although it is a particularly spectacular one, the double-flowered 'Aphrodite.' But without further information I could easily be led to expect a narrow plant more like a lily. Now THAT could play havoc with my design scheme!