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Plant Life Valerie Easton

10 Indispensables

The world-traveling Dan Hinkley picks plants that shine right here at home

Dan Hinkley didn't agonize over whittling his vast palette of plants down to a favorite 10. I expected him to wheedle for plants so exclusive most of us would never be able to track them down. But his practical choices reveal that this globe-trotting friend-of-Martha's remains at heart a dirt gardener.

• What's not to love about a drought-tolerant evergreen shrub from Australia with honeysuckle-like blossoms in winter? Grevillea victoriae has handsome gray-green foliage, grows quickly to 6 feet and sports nectar-rich orange flowers over many months. Plant it and hummingbirds will stay put in your garden all winter long.

• You get a sense of Hinkley's own garden when he explains why he admires Yucca filamentosa 'Color Guard.' "The best part is that it can be overrun with wayward perennials during the summer yet emerge unbothered to fill the void during the winter." Think this guy has smothered a few plants in his time? 'Color Guard' is long-lived and easy to grow, with bright yellow vertical stripes and spires of white flowers.

• Solanum crispum 'Glasnevin' is a gardener's dream because it blossoms longer than any other plant in the Pacific Northwest. Blue star-like flowers with yellow centers open in March and bloom through Thanksgiving. This is one easy-care plant; it doesn't run, produce fruit or need dead-heading. While it is usually trained as a vine, Hinkley grows it as a shrub in his new garden.

• "I collected the seed of Beesia deltophylla from a mountain in Sichuan (China) in 1998, and now wouldn't be without it," says Hinkley of this pretty shade plant unknown to most of us. An easy-to-grow perennial with purple-flushed, heart-shaped leaves, when beesia emerges from the ground in spring it brings to mind a violet on steroids.

• Don't you love that a world-famous plantsman has a rose on his personal "10 best" list? Anyone who ever visited the late, lamented Heronswood Nursery must surely remember the vivid Rosa 'Eddie's Jewel' growing near the house. Its arching canes reach 20 feet and are smothered in single cherry-red blossoms, but it made the cut as much for its completely disease-resistant foliage as for its pretty flowers.

• "This is the largest-leafed plant we can grow in the Pacific Northwest," says Hinkley of Gunnera tinctoria. A monster perennial with coarse, ribbed leaves as big as my Volkswagen bug, it needs full sun or at least bright light, and moist but not soggy soil. If large leaves are the tonic for dull plant scenarios, then gunnera is a mega-dose for whatever ails your garden.

• "The perfect plant to replicate the effect of bamboo without bamboo's wayward habits," says Hinkley of Disporum cantoniense. He collected this evergreen species of fairy bells in Yunnan, China, in 1996. It has pale, dangling flowers and stems flushed with purple in spring, grows 6 feet tall, and clumps rather than runs like bamboo.

• While you might expect Schefflera taiwaniana, with its shiny, multi-fingered leaves, to be a houseplant, this species is reliably hardy outdoors. Hinkley collected it above 12,000 feet in Taiwan and considers this highly textural evergreen one of the most exciting small trees he's ever collected from that flora-rich location.

• What would any plant-lover's "best of" list be without an ornamental grass? Hinkley's choice is Stipa gigantea for June bloom he describes as "diaphanous sparkling dusters of gold." Plant this tidy and long-lived stipa where its willowy flower spikes are backlit by morning or late afternoon sun.

• Pittosporum tenuifolium 'Tom Thumb' or 'County Park Dwarf' may be the most versatile plant on Hinkley's list. A dense, hardy evergreen shrub from New Zealand, it has black-purple foliage and dark, fragrant summer flowers. True to its cultivar name, this pittosporum grows only 2 feet high so is ideal as a groundcover, in a container or a mixed border.

"Easy does it is the theme here," says Hinkley. "Plants need not be rare to be good, nor are rare plants any harder to grow than those commonly found." Every one of these 10 indispensables flourishes in Hinkley's new Indianola garden, which Garden Design magazine recently declared one of the very best in America.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "A Pattern Garden." Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Julie Notarianni is a Seattle Times news artist.

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