Friday Fabulous Flower - False Forsythia, real fragrance

Tomorrow's Friday Fabulous Flower is a much under appreciated early flowering spring shrub in the Olive family.  Wait! TPP is a day early not one or two days late?  Yes, tomorrow is a travel and work day for this botanist, and since this plant was decided upon yesterday, the decision was made to get on with it and not disappoint any readers who rely upon the FFF for a much needed positive, upbeat, mental therapy type of post.  This author is included in that group, and thus the Phactor has been largely silent about the political side of things.

This shrub is sometimes called a dwarf or false forsythia, both rather confusing because there are dwarfish species of forsythia, and this isn't a forsythia at all but Abeliophyllum distichum. This is an easy to care for, shade tolerant shrub, and quite cold hardy.  It isn't screaming gaudy in flower, but more of a lacy whiteness, or light pinkness if you get a variety roseum.  It is one of the earliest of flowering shrubs (28 Feb here, it's earliest ever date to flower).  The flowers do rather look like small white-pink forsythia flowers, but that really just means a typical enough olive family flower. The neatest thing is that the flowers are highly fragrant, and a flowering twig or two will perfume an entire room with a honey-lilac (another olive family member) fragrance.  This is where the scratch and sniff computer screen would be great.  Every yard should have room for one or two of these smallish shrubs although they are not real common in the trade.

Friday Fabulous Fall Color

It's a late fall this year and a lot of plants are slow in developing fall color.  Here's witch hazel showing you why you should plant it.  It grows in the shade, it's a pretty tough plant, it flowers very, very early in the spring, and it has great fall color.  In general it's an under planted, under appreciated shrub that is a bit too subtle for your average suburbanite.   

New fall flowering shrub - "dwarf lilac"

Here's a new shrub that TPP is trying out, a so-called "dwarf lilac" (Leptodermis oblonga), but hate the common name, probably a "what shall we call this?" type of name because it isn't a lilac and it isn't even in the olive family.  So far this is a hardy, zone 5, at least with regards to cold, mounding shrub of a small size, under 2 feet.  It's October, and it's in flower when little else flowers, not awesomely showy, but pleasant enough with the 1 cm wide flowers clustered at the ends of stems.  Other than color there isn't anything very lilacy about the flowers; it's in the rue family.   Given it's size it will be in the front of beds anyways otherwise it just won't be seen at all.  It grows well enough in part shade, but TPP would recommend morning sun and afternoon shade because it wilts easily, more so than the azaleas in the same bed, so it's summer heat tolerance is a bit in question.  As it turns out this species is native to northern China so this is no surprise really, and maybe even a low alpine plant.  Alpines are quite cold hardy, but they don't do well in the summer heat of the Midwest.  So we shall see how this develops.