Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip' - Bugleweed
Picture a saucepan full of rich, molten chocolate.  Slowly let it dribble out, drop by drop, to form chips on your cookie sheet.  Savor the visual patterns being created.  Now imagine the same patterns at the front of your garden, shade or sun.  Delicious!  Forming thousands of miniature leaves, this Ajuga hardly resembles its coarser cousins.  Its vibrant chocolate hue will neatly delineate your garden from your lawn or pathway or it can be used to carpet a whole area in stunning contrast to the rest of your garden.  Although it’s as vigorous as its larger cousins, it is never invasive.  Its intense, violet-blue spikes rise three inches over the foliage in May-June, providing a great bonus to its all-season charm.
Sun Exposure: Full sun to full shade
Cold Hardiness: Zones 4-9
Spacing: 6-10"
Growth Rate: Moderate to fast
Water Needs: Prefers moist and well drained soil
Anemone sylvestris 'Elise Fellmann' - Elise Fellmann Anemone
A “pompom” double wood anemone?  White flowers more double than dandelions?  “I don’t think so”, you may say.  Well, here it is!  ‘Elise Feldman’, whoever you are, thank you!  A plant that will bloom two months in the spring and, with a modicum of summer watering, again in the fall.  This carefree inhabitant of open woodlands will luxuriate in your rich forest loam making a rich carpet of 10-15” tall, arching stems bearing ivory white flowers. Try combining them with botanical bulbs such as grape hyacinths, Siberian squill or English Bluebells.  Keep in mind that it won’t hurt to keep your neighbors in awe of your gardening skills.

Sun Exposure: High shade to part sun
Cold Hardiness: Zone 4-8
Spacing: 12"
Growth Rate: Moderate
Water Needs: Minimal; an occasional summer dousing
Ballota nigra 'Pranching Jester' - Variegated Black Horehound
Do plants laugh?  “Of course not!”, you may say.  Then look at this plant.  Imagine it nodding in the evening breeze, laughing clownishly as it does.  Its vivid variegation lends a playful note to a sometimes too somber garden, that interim period during which all your plants seem to have finished their bloom cycle or not yet begun the next.  Color your garden with texture and foliage like this and link the bloom cycles.  The 20” blue spikes this happy fellow makes later in the summer is just an added bonus to its all-season frivolity.  Isn’t it time to add a bit of comic theater to your summer border?

Sun Exposure: Full Sun
Cold Hardiness: Zone 5-9
Spacing: 12-18"
Growth Rate: Vigorous
Water Needs: Normal but resents drying out
Baptisia australis 'Caspian Blue' - Caspian Blue False Indigo
Think of a lake reflecting the clear, June sky at noon:  more muted than the sky itself but shimmering with intensity.  Picture a cluster of 3’ spikes of that color at the back of your sunny border, perhaps framing a clump of rose-colored peonies or maybe a cluster of nodding poppies, either shell pink or pale salmon.  This Baptisia forms a multi-stemmed plant capped with lupine-like spires of this rich yet subtle shade of blue.  Each floret is centered white offering eye-catching contrast.  After flowering the uniform, vase shape of the plant bears rich green foliage all season offering a most pleasing architectural form, always useful in providing necessary structure to your entire garden.

Sun Exposure: Full sun
Cold Hardiness: Zones 5-9
Spacing: 2-3'
Growth Rate: Rather slow but long-lived
Water Needs: Drought resistant once established
Bergenia 'Rosi Klose' - Rosi Klose Saxifrage
We generally aren’t happy with the genus Bergenia.  After all, how can you like a plant that doesn’t bloom reliably, whose leaves tend to gnarl up and whose stems get leggy after two years?  After three years in trial we’ve concluded that Bergenia ‘Rosi Klose’ has none of those vices.  Every year we’ve had beautiful hyacinth-like, pink blooms in April-May and even sometimes again in October.  The leaves have never gnarled and the whole plant has stayed very compact, never yet exposing any ugly stems.  Perhaps its most notable attribute is its glossy, bronze-red winter foliage, a stunning sight poking out of fresh snow.  Try combining ‘Rosi Klose’ with Athyrium ‘Branford Beauty’ and Epimediums in your woodland garden.  Flowers yes, but this year think texture too.

Sun Exposure: Part shade to full shade
Cold Hardiness: Zones 5-9
Spacing: 12-15"
Growth Rate: Rather slow
Water Needs: Tolerates wet or dry soils
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