Star Gardener

By Abby Jane Brody

me down as much as others because for the past six to eight weeks I have been totally absorbed and then entranced by the growth of the stalks, buds, and finally flowers of Baptisia Purple Smoke.

Purple Smoke is as good as Tony Avent, owner of the North Carolina mail-order nursery Plant Delights (www.plantdelights.com), says it is, even though Tony is a modern-day equivalent of the old traveling elixir salesman. The flower spike and buds are a deep gray washed with a purple "bloom," which makes the name of the hybrid precisely accurate.

Perhaps because spring brought so much rain and cool weather, the progression from bud to flower went on longer than normal, for week after wonderful week. It was hard to believe that the dark buds would open to dusky lavender flowers. As the flowers matured, the lavender lightened until the petals fluttered to the ground.

A few flowers remain, but the blue-green trifoliolate leaves will add texture to the border for the rest of the season. My plant is in its third season in the garden and is three feet high and wide. It put out approximately 30 flower stalks, with the flowers opening from the bottom of the stalk, climbing upward. As it matures it may gain another foot in height and perhaps two in width, and could bear more than 50 blooming stalks. After flowering, it will be a grand architectural and background plant for the summer-blooming flowers.

Kim Hawks, founder of Niche Gardens in Chapel Hill, N.C., and co-introducer of Purple Smoke, recommends cutting back the foliage of baptisias about one-third after flowering to keep the bush compact. Sounds like an excellent idea.

The botanists and horticulturists who write about baptisias, whose flowers are similar to lupines or peas, say it takes patience for baptisias to mature and put on their best show. What they didn't say is that it took even more patience to obtain a plant. It took me three years of being told there was a "crop failure" or it was sold out before I finally obtained one. Obviously, I am not a member-in-good-standing in the plant mafia.

You won't have to wait as long as I did: the wholesale nursery in Sagaponack, Garden Treasure, has full pots that are ready to go.

Purple Smoke was found and watched over by Rob Gardner, propagation curator at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill, which specializes in native plants. He found it in a block of Baptisia minor (blue flowers) seedlings, where its parent must have been pollinated by a white Baptisia alba. It was jointly introduced in 1996 by the North Carolina Botanical Gardens and Niche Gardens. Like most baptisias, Purple Smoke wants full sun and well-drained soil.

My first encounter with baptisias was on a visit to Woodlanders in Aiken, S.C., in 1993. Woodlanders is a mail-order nursery (www.woodlanders.net) that has specialized in locating and selecting the finest native plants, primarily from the Southeast. Many wholesale and other mail-order nurseries offer Woodlanders introductions, and they are sure to be the finest of their kind. The trial and show gardens at Woodlanders are so full of plants that are new to most gardeners that during a full day's visit you scarcely absorb the tip of the iceberg. The collection of baptisias, however, together with Coreopsis pulchra and several species of pycnanthemum, remains sharply etched in my memory.

It was the memory of those plants at Woodlanders that made me so determined to obtain a Purple Smoke.

There are about 35 species of baptisia, and all are native to the United States. Its common name is wild indigo. The blue form, Baptisia australis, was used as a substitute for blue dyes, and for years, I believe, blue indigo was an important commercial crop in South Carolina. (Ironically, I worked for the German chemical company that invented synthetic indigo in the 1890s that put our U.S. production out of business.)

Baptisia australis is the most popular of the baptisias used in gardens. Next time you pass or visit Sage Street Antiques in Sag Harbor, take a look at the huge bushes that fill the border inside the white picket fence. B. australis is generally grown by seed and has a large variation in color. The colors of each bush at Sage Street Antiques are different from one another.

If you have a large border that can accommodate a plant that matures to about four feet across without being crowded by other plants and you want blue flowers, by all means use B. australis. Or, you might prefer to plant them as single specimens or in their own beds. Because of the wide color variation, you would do well to select your plants in flower to know exactly what shade you are getting.

Since seeing it for the first time at Woodlanders, I have had a special fondness for Baptisia minor, which may be a variant of B. australis. It grows only to about 18 inches and its foliage is the same blue-green, but smaller in scale. Mine is taking forever to become established. It's been in its spot for four years and this year pushed out only a single flower spike, but the blue was like that of a deep sapphire, which may make the long wait worthwhile.

William Cullina, the nursery manager and propagator for the New England Wild Flower Society, writes in his first-rate book "Growing and Propagating Wildflowers of the United States and Canada" (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) that baptisias grow from a thick, woody rootstock that takes a few seasons to develop underground before the plant can mature. And the perennials guru Alan M. Armitage of the University of Georgia says in his book "Herbaceous Perennial Plants" (Varsity Press Inc., 1989) that if you feel you must divide a baptisia, do it in early spring or fall, making a clean cut with a sharp knife and watering generously after transplanting.

My Purple Smoke is planted midway in the garden so I never notice its long, bare lower stems. If the plants are in the open, a number of writers recommend surrounding them with groundcovers, especially those with yellow or silver foliage, or flowers that accentuate the blue-green of the baptisia foliage.

I assume it's the botanists who have gone overboard naming and renaming the white baptisias, in particular. It is too tedious when all we want is a plant with certain characteristics that will look good and perform well in the garden.

I put out a number of calls to gardeners looking for white baptisias. And bless Carol Mercer of the Secret Garden, she not only returned my call but said she had two different varieties (see photographs). To make life even easier for me, she put several pots in the middle of her deck so I couldn't miss them. While I'm at it, I'll even give her credit for making one of the few sunny days we've had in recent months.

Perhaps the only understatement Tony Avent has made in his life occurred in his article on baptisias in Horticulture Magazine, June 2002. "The white species have suffered from being taxonomically muddled." And don't worry, I have no intention of trying to clear up the dilemma.

From photographs and descriptions the white variety, which flowers after the other baptisias and has sturdy black, upright stems, is now called Baptisia albescens (formerly B. alba). Mr. Avent says it is a "great" garden plant; most grow to four feet tall, but he saw one on a dry roadbank that was seven feet high. If you have a good-sized garden and want good architectural plants with special additional attributes, the black stems and white flowers of Baptisia albescens would make it an excellent selection.

I'm not certain of the name of the second white species at Carol Mercer's house, with the light stem and partially opened flowers with soft yellow inside the outer white petals. It could be B. alba var. alba (formerly B. pendula), less possibly B. leucantha, now named B. alba var. macrophylla. B. leucantha is native to the Midwest from Minnesota to Tennessee and can grow from five to seven feet tall. It does not produce many flower spikes and Alan Armitage says it does not do very well in the East.

So my guess is the photograph of the purple-blue tinted stalked white plant is B. alba var. alba (formerly B. pendula). The outdated species designation "pendula" comes from the angle of its seed pods. And by the way, for the flower arrangers among you, the seed pods are considered very desirable.

There are also some very interesting "new" yellow baptisias. Plant Delights is offering a hybrid called Carolina Moonlight. Like Purple Smoke, it was found by Rob Gardner at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens. It grows to three feet wide and has 18-inch spikes of soft, buttery-yellow flowers.

Bob McCartney of Woodlanders quietly goes about his business of locating fantastic plants. The catalog is very carefully written, but has no photographs and is short on adjectives. His plants tend to end up in other mail-order catalogs, where the superlatives fall over one another.

All I am leading up to is that Woodlanders lists two very interesting yellow baptisias. The hybrid yellow false indigo grows to about two feet high with six to eight-inch spikes of showy, bright yellow flowers. The second is from a collection they made of B. sphaerocarpa in Texas that is 18 to 24 inches high with spikes of showy yellow flowers. Both of the Woodlanders offerings are propagated from cuttings, for uniformity and predictability.

There is so little sun in my garden in the best of times that I am reduced to triage. For every new sun-loving plant that comes in, one has to depart. How am I going to decide which of the yellow baptisias to order, and how is it possible for a gardener to live at peace without making space for the black-stalked B. alba var. alba?