Mystery Plant!

One of the fun things about moving to a home with an established garden is discovering new things. Many of them I knew about before coming here even if I never grew them.

This grass is familiar to me but I have no real idea what it is. A Carex? Acorus? It looks like this year round and you can see the little spent bloom heads from last season.

It's not that impressive right now but I think it would look great near my little pond. I'd love some ideas on what it is and how to treat it. As you can see, there's lots of common orange daylilies growing around it and through it.

Believe it or not, in all my years of gardening I've never had pachysandra! Can't say I love or adore it but at least right now it's green and Claus my garden Gnome is quite happy.

Up close the blooms are actually quite nice. I'm going to try to take some more shots this weekend with my new camera.

For those of you who want to see my little cottage, I just posted some photos on my sister blog, Melanie's Old Country Gardens.

Love to hear your suggestions about my mystery plant!

The 'Pearl'

There's a plant in my shade bed that is just coming into full bloom. Earlier in the year I wrote a post about it, I don't know what it is (nor can I find the post but it's starting out as one of those days...).

My guess has always been that this plant is part of the Cimicifuga family which has for some reason be renamed as the Actea family.

It seeds around nicely and the seedlings don't seem to mind being transplanted. (I've still got more to share.)

Here you can see the whole plant. Although I tried a number of times, my camera just doesn't want to focus on the white blooms. The leaves aren't as finely cut as the Cimicifugas I see online or for sale. As a mature plant it gets quite large. A nice bonus is that the leaves don't seem to be affected by the slugs that have been ravishing this part of the garden.

There is a Cimicifuga named 'White Pearl'. I know that this plant is not that specific hybrid because these are all seedlings but it sure looks quite a bit like a strand of white pearls.

Out in front of my house I have Cimicifuga 'James Compton' which I bought last year. It caught my attention because of it's dark, almost purple foliage. As you can see here, the bloom is very similar but the buds are dark purple.

If I could bring this to you in smell-a-vision you would just swoon because the scent is heavenly! I never would have expected this simple flower to have such a strong smell and at first I looked around to see what else was blooming. As an afterthough, I think I'll cut a bloom and bring it inside to see how long the perfume lasts.

Here you can see the foliage of 'James Compton' when I bought it. So far I can't say the foliage has done much in the garden, I couldn't get a single decent shot of it yesterday and will try again today. As with most purple foliage plants, it's lost it's coloration this late in the season and now just appears to be dark green with hints of purple (squint hard and you might see it).

If you decide to plant this in your garden I would suggest buying 3 or 5 and planting them as a group unless you are a very patient gardener.

In truth I did have a second photo showing this foliage but there wasn't the adorable face peeping out from behind. Calie-the-wonderdoodle had to sneak her way into my photo shoot that day. It was a pretty amazing feat for this big lumbering 70 pound dog to slip into that corner and appear so innocent.