Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow tree peony and friend

Next to magnolias and other magnoliales TPP's favorite flowers are tree peonies, and among those nothing is better looking than my yellow tree peonies.  This particular plant is about 4 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter.  This year it has a couple of dozen of these huge yellow flowers.  This year the bastard balm (yes, that's its common name), one of the showier members of the mint family was in full bloom at the same time so everyone gets a two-fer to make up for some of the Friday's missed.  As this is being typed the peony is about 6 feet to my left just below the window, and the floral fragrance, such that it is, a hard to describe floral muskiness is quite evident.  Eh, you don't grow them for their fragrance.  The yellow-flowered tree peonies routinely flower several days behind the white and pink flowered ones.  TPP has one of the Itoh hybrids with yellow flowers but they just aren't as commanding a presence.  They lack the red highlights in the center.  The hybrids are hardy, fast-growing, and vigorous, but they still seem as light beer is to a full-bodied lager.     

Friday Fabulous Flower - Bastard Balm

Every garden has one or two tough spots, and one of ours sits and the junction of a sidewalk and driveway, where it is shady all day, but with a shot of late afternoon direct sun, but an area that is often quite dry.  Most plants that do well in dry places also do well in full sun as the two are usually related, but this spot is too shady for such plants and this is known because many have tried (to grow there) and many have failed.  So it was that while seeking something new, the Phactor happened upon bastard balm and noted a suggestion that it might do OK in a dry semi-shady spot.  As it turns out, it does grow, quite handsomely in this very tough spot forming an biggish (40-50 cm tall) clump of lush foliage and with a very impressive floral display as well, some of the biggest of mint flowers.  And it's better behaved that most mints.  What's not to like?
The common name is a bit strange, bastard balm.  What is illegitimate about this balm?  Here the Phactor offers a guess.  The species name is Melittis melissophyllum.  The genus is derived from the Greek for bee, and bees do like it,  and the specific epithet means leaves like Melissa, another mint genus whose name is also derived from the Greek for honeybee, in other words the "bee balm".  Melittis then becomes the illegitimate balm by looking like the real thing. Anybody got a better story?