Some plants provide entertainment for the whole season and others just don’t and I sometimes have to try very hard to remember why we give clunkers space in the gardens. Campanula lactiflora or Milky bellflower is one of those plants – winner of the Most Likely to Leave the Party Early superlative. We have a sizable clump in a prominent spot right at the corner of the North Garden horseshoe and there’s no doubt that its reaching french-blue blooms get plenty of comments and compliments at the end of June and a little bit into July. But as soon as the flowers shrivel and turn brown from the top down, the foliage starts to go south too and that’s why I think it’s a clunker – and a party pooper.

Last week Gail and I shared our annual indecision over whether it’s better to leave the dried and skrunky sticks so at least it looks like there was a there there versus cutting it back, leaving a giant hole. We always opt to cut it back. What would you do? Right next to that clump, in party-on contrast, is another enormous clump of a plant that also only blooms for a nanosecond in June but hangs out in the garden telling jokes all season long. Is there anything better than Baptisia australis (False indigo) with its sturdy ever-blue foliage and dramatic black seed pods? Actually, I’m seriously asking because I would love to take out the campanula and replace it with something else that will stay to the end in bloom and out. What can you recommend that’s around 3-4′ tall with a blue or yellow flower that blooms in late June and has good looking foliage from May to at least October — besides amsonia?

I think there must be a place for the introverted campanula. I don’t want to rule it out entirely because the blooms are such a sublime color. But it’s the sort of plant that requires careful placement to ensure that it’s completely hidden by something else by the middle of July. (Unfortunately ours is not only not hidden but fronted by an equally disastrous and hole producing blighted peony…) But if there’s another plant in the world with extrovert virtues that include a long season of interest like baptisia (and amsonia), I’d trade the campanula (and the peony) for it in a nanosecond.

Who’s the life of the party in your garden? Do you have any poopers?

It could happen to anyone. Even the “professionals” get it a little bit wrong sometimes … sometimes in a pretty big way. Last week when I discovered a rather substantial error in mistaken identity that Gail and I made, I swore that I wasn’t going to tell a soul. It was too embarrassing. It seemed like everywhere I looked another wrong plant was about to bloom in the North Garden. I kept pulling them out and stuffing them deeply into the weed bag while looking guiltily over my shoulder in case anyone saw. I was pretty mortified. But then today, when I was still finding clumps of mistake and Lilah turned it into an I-Spy game, I found it much more hilarious and thought you might get a chuckle out of it too.

I’m sure it could happen to anyone. This spring, in our annual effort to freshen and improve the North Garden, Gail and I moved several perennials from the Display Garden including a couple dozen divisions of Echinacea purpurea. We did this pretty early in the season – I can tell you that it was Monday, April 27th because I wrote in the calendar, “Gail and I moved echinaceas from DG to NG” – and on that date they were just minuscule clumps of pointed basal leaves and roots. Well. It turns out that some of them weren’t echinaceas at all. Neither of us has a memory of any rudbeckia in with the echinacea in the Display Garden but I just yanked an easy dozen Black-eyed Susans (Rudbecka fulgida) out of the North Garden. We did introduce a couple of new colors into that garden this year but school bus-yellow, as one of our good friends describes it, is definitely not one of them.

The good news is that the garden is really full and it’s impossible to see where any of these plants came out. As a matter of fact, that many echinaceas might have been too many – but we won’t know that until we maybe try again next year. Meanwhile, I feel slightly less idiotic since discovering that E. purpurea was once identified as R. purpurea and our mistake was an honest one. And yet…

It could happen to anyone – couldn’t it?

As gaps go, this wasn’t a bad one in my book. Just now I seem to prefer a garden in budded transition – I think it satisfies my need for a glass is half full optimistic outlook (which may be followed all too closely by the half empty pessimism as soon as the buds open and I begin to mourn their passing). And just as the gap started to close on its own in the North Garden, we started planting annuals to help fill it up. Placing annuals is a mental toughness test for Gail and me – tempers can flare, frustration ensues, ennui sets in. Every year we have to relearn how to make the soup with “too many cooks” but the truth of the matter is we’re dependent on each other and wouldn’t want to attempt it alone. So we hemmed and hawed and placed and planted annuals (we couldn’t have done that without the volunteers!) in the annual pockets vacated by the tulips last week and in other open slivers of ground. And it will be beautiful. I’m especially proud of a little coup – a new color in the garden. We placed annuals in the Rose Garden the same morning and a tiny dahlia ordered for the Rose was switched at the last minute to the North. After all, what is a more divine complement to the prevailing french blue-y purples than a delicious apricot orange? We’re only a little nervous that it could look vile with all the pinks…

Here are a few of the May gap perennials in bloom just this week.

- Isn’t this the most OMG! iris? I swear I have never caught this bloom before and have no identification for it.  All I know is it’s one of Julie Morris’ favorites and I always wondered why.

Is your May gap filling up? Have you started planting annuals? Are you feeling pretty optimistic about it all?