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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.
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!
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