It’s the small things you appreciate when you’re a shade/partial shade gardener

On the way back from a wedding yesterday, we stopped by the botanical garden’s annual plant sale. You can pre-order annuals and perennials, but there are always a lot of leftovers from those batches of plants as well as many other plants that can’t be pre-ordered. This year I was very pleasantly surprised by a new torenia that did not appear on the preorder list. I’d never seen or heard of it before, but it is gorgeous. Torenia is one of my favorite shade annuals; you can’t use it in deep shade, but it flowers all season and fills in quite nicely. So far they’ve all been blue and purple. Until now! Had any of you seen this cultivar? The color mix is yellow and maroon; it’s called Yellow Moon and the tag credits Danziger Flower Farm. (I've also posted on Garden Rant about it today.)


So there I am in my heels, stockings, and black dress, all excited about the torenia and trying not to get dirty. (This is one of those weddings where there’s a gap before the reception.) I also got a couple burgundy-leaved canna (not ID’d but I’m pretty sure what they are), some lovely variegated ivies, perhaps to mix with the torenia, and, yes, I’m sorry fellow gardeners, an entire flat of white impatiens. Don’t hate me. Very little else will work in the soon-to-be deeply shaded front yard. I also got some fabulous coleus. All the coleus is fabulous these days, don’t you think? The newly available varieties just keep coming. These are like stained glass. Of course, they’re all in the house, along with 50 other recently-purchased plants; it will be 39 tonight.