Specialty Gardening: Plants that show good Fall foliage color , 0 by DonnaMack

DonnaMack wrote:
Cactuspatch,

All I can say is more! The pyracantha photo is beautiful. I think you will find more than one lover of red here.

Semper I have definitely found heucheras, heucherellas and tiarellas difficult. I fell in love with a magnificant tiarella called "lacquerleaf". I purchased four for the north side of my house so that I could look out the window in the dead of winter and admire them. I believe it was a Terra Nova Nurseries introduction that I purchased from Shady Oaks Nursey (which then became wholesale only). Here is a description:

This recent selection features glossy dark-green maple-shaped leaves. Delicate spikes of fragrant, near white flowers appear in late spring. Winter foliage colour is rich bronzy-purple.

They were wonderful, but they slowly faded away. Heucherella Bridget Bloom lasted three or four years. I think that, amongst other things, these plants have difficulty with competition even with care. But I noticed something interesting. My next door neighbor, who is the lovely person I described above, does absolutely nothing for her perennials (no water, fertilizer or compost!) and simply has a yard team come clean up twice a year, has a set of at least ten heuchera with red flowers that bloom like mad and come back year after year!

I put in some Firefly three years ago that have thrived with pretty complete neglect. I am usually a person who, my husband says "caresses every leaf" but all I would do is say, oh yes, let's dead head you. So I popped six plants grown from seed in a bed and they have done very well. They are slowly "bulking up". Given that all of the seed strains I have grown from J.L. Hudson seeds have produced plants, I think that I will watch their offerings.

I just realized that I have a photo from early November that shows the leaves of one of them. Also it shows a little group of primula japonica, which I just love and put in with athyrium felix femina (fading to the right). Japanese primroses are amazingly resilient if you just throw water on them. One was so much so that it was trying to rebloom at the beginning of November. I'm not sure why I found it so charming, but I did.

Donna