Foliage Follow-up -September 2014

This is my first attempt at joining Pam Penick on Folliage Follow-up meme at her Digging blog.  Folliage is very important for me..possibly more important than flowers, reason why I plant a lot of perennials because I like their foliage. For this month I pick just a few of the many great foliage plants I grow and will share with you more in future posts.

Purple Fountain Grass (Pennisetum setaceum "Rubrum") is the center plant in my front pots

The front pots never get watered by me, just the rainfall so the plants have to be drought tolerant.  Also, this area of the house faces west and gets the afternoon sun.  While the Purple Fountain Grass is not hardy to our area (zone 9) it is such a easy to grow, hard working grass.  I've been buying it for the last 4 years and I am still not tired of it. Every year I change the companion plants to vary the look of the container but I haven't changed yet the Primadona of this arrangement.  The filler plant this year is a cute spotted coleus that hasn't grown bushy enough and you can hardly see it here (possibly not enough water).  The trailers are Sweet potato vine on the back, Calibrachoa "Apricot Punch" and Wire Wine ( Muehlenbeckia maxillaries) in the front. The pots are placed near blue foliage plants as "Elijah Blue" grass, "Halcyon" Hosta and "Blue star" Juniper. You can also see the Sedum "Brilliance" and a taller pyramidal form of Dwarf Alberta Spruce.

Ornamental grass, Eulalia or Miscanthus sinensis "Adagio" (zone 5-9)

Garden Blogger Bloom Day - September 2014

Welcome to our September garden here in Ohio, USA (USDA hardiness Zone 5b). As you are going to see, there are lots of flowers blooming in the garden. This month I will have them organized by color to make it ..well more organized than it actually looks like this time of the year.

Whites

Autumn Clematis or Clematis terniflora

Yellow Wax Bells

Kirengeshoma palmate  or yellow wax bells is a species of flowering plant in the family Hydrangaceae, native to Japan [1]. It is a clump-forming herbaceous perennial growing to 25 in tall by 30 in broad, with palmate leaves, and fleshy, pale yellow flowers borne on slender maroon stems in late summer. This plant is growing well for me in a shady, moist location in acidic soil.

I never see nice pictures of this plant when I google it, reason why I want to post mine.  I had this plant for about 8 years and moved it around once when it looked very sick and sad couple springs ago. 

It has beautiful large foliage all season until late summer. I like the foliage a lot.  

In this May picture you see a bluish tint to the leaves  and a lovely texture.

The blooms are delicate light yellow blooming now since beginning of September. The stems that support the blooms are too thin and long for the weight of the bloom reason why they droop or fall all the way to the ground.  In this picture, some of the weaker blooming stems are supported with green bamboo sticks that are cut not too high and not too low so they hide well inside the plant.

The mature specimen I have is quite large.  It covers some of its weaker neighbors. It completely dominated two of my highly prized Ligularia, reason why they will look for a new home this fall. I am going to try to propagate the Yellow Wax Bell plant.  If I succeed, I will follow-up with a post about the details.

References[edit]

1. Jump up^ RHS A-Z encyclopedia of garden plants. United Kingdom: Dorling Kindersley. 2008. p. 1136.

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