Pleasant run nursery. (Photo courtesy of Craig Dupée.)
A look at Copper Beauty, Joe Pye Weed, Leptodermis oblonga, Green Gable, Radiance and Lanham’s Purple
This month, I was invited to an open house at one of my favorite wholesale nurseries in the area.
According to the invitation, pizza and refreshments would be provided. I really did not care about the pizza, knowing that it would be pizza delivered in a cardboard box. The main reason to attend the open house was to see underused, new and exciting plant material that is available to the green industry.
I get excited the way my children do when they receive a gift card to Toys R Us; they will browse the aisles for hours looking for that one special item. Going to a nursery is my adult experience of a toy store — walking the rows of plants, pondering their different and unique characteristics and how to use them in the garden.
To my surprise and delight, the pizza was not delivered in a cardboard box, but was handmade at the nursery in a wood fired brick oven installed in a restored 1949 REO Speedwagon truck. Nomad Pizza of Hopewell drove their truck out to the nursery and made gourmet pizzas for the event. Gourmet pizza, awesome plants, liquid libation and down to earth knowledgeable plant people — it was an outstanding event!
This leads me to write about some of the plants that caught my eye and are available from local garden centers, which can be purchased and incorporated into your landscape.
My first plant is Colutea x media ‘Copper Beauty’. It is a strong growing shrub that likes full sun, all types of soil conditions (except wet), and will grow to 6-8 feet. It has flowers that are orange-yellow which appear in June and will bloom throughout the rest of the season. Toward the end of the season, the bluish-green foliage may get a little loose and floppy looking, so it would be advisable to have companion plants that help support it.
One of my favorite perennials to use in wet conditions and full sun is Joe Pye Weed. So, to introduce a Joe Pye Weed that has variegated foliage, just makes me gasp in wonderment. This Joe Pye Weed is Eupatorium fortunei ‘Pink Frost’ and, as with all Joe Pye Weeds, is a butterfly magnet. It will grow to about three feet tall, has deep pink flowers in late summer, and has dark green leaves set off with creamy yellow edges. The variegation of its leaves makes this plant a great foliage accent plant in the garden during the growing season.
Leptodermis oblonga is a cute dwarf mounding, deciduous shrub that will grow to only 12-18 inches tall but produces flowers throughout much of the growing season. It has fragrant, tubular, violet-purple flowers that appear in clusters in late spring. It likes well-drained soil and full sun, plus it is deer resistant. This may be a nice groundcover to try paired with dark leaved Heucheras for some nice color contrast of their leaves.
Nyssa sylvatica ‘Green Gable’ is a Black Gum tree that has nice, glossy green leaves and outstanding deep red fall color, typical of the species. It has an upright, dense, pyramidal form with uniform branching, and will grow to 50 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Green Gable likes full sun to partial shade and is wet site tolerant.
Ozothamnus diosmifolius ‘Radiance’ is a prolific flowering shrub that blooms all season long with clusters of papery white flowers. Radiance is a very neat, clean plant that naturally self cleans as flowers mature. A special feature of this variety is its aromatic foliage — when crushed, the leaves smell like curry! A very neat shrub, it will grow to 3 feet tall in full sun or partial shade, is excellent as a low hedge, and can be enjoyed as a cut flower.
Rhus copallina ‘Lanham’s Purple’ is an outstanding form of our native winged sumac, with deep purple new growth darkening to burgundy-green over summer and culminating in a crescendo of purple, red, orange and yellow in the fall. Like most of our native sumacs, Lanham’s Purple is very tolerant of poor dry sites. This sumac will grow to 10 feet tall and form thickets and sucker somewhat especially if the roots are disturbed.
I could go on forever in writing about the noteworthy plants that were at the open house. Seventy-five plants were talked about and I only mentioned five. Check out your local garden center to see if they have any of these plants for sale, and give them a try.
“All gardening is landscape painting.” —Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening
Craig Dupée is a garden-design consultant. He lives in Ewing with his wife and daughters. Send him your email questions at hort1014u@aol.com.
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