The Performance Review

At season's end, we take stock of what went well and what didn't

THIS IS THE TIME of year to temper all that wildly acquisitive spring plant passion with some end-of-season realism. I try to tour the garden, pen and notebook in hand, before I'm too distracted by bulb planting to pay close attention to which plants starred and which were disappointments.

This was yet another odd weather year, one in which foliage seemed to burgeon at the expense of flowers and fruit. The winter was exceptionally warm and dry, bringing drastic drought warnings. These were cut short by a soggy, cool spring, except for the couple of searing May days when temperatures shot past 90 and burned fresh foliage. The summer was pleasant but droughty from mid-July through late August, and autumn came early with a September that felt more like October. All this adds up to plant confusion, if not stress, a good thing to keep in mind before getting too critical about plant performance.

I usually quickly compost any plants that aren't happy, because I don't need suffering or ungainly plants around to make me feel like a bad gardener. But even though the yellow leaves of Hosta 'Sum and Substance' and the Midas-kissed foliage of the golden spirit smoke bush (Cotinus coggygria 'Ancot') looked pretty tired by the end of the summer, I blame this on my own slowness in figuring out the right amount of water to administer in our sandy Whidbey Island soil. Plus, it was their first summer — I have high hopes for lovely, lasting golden foliages next summer.

Two plants I wouldn't give garden room to again are the new Cosmos 'Double Click' and Agastache 'Golden Jubilee.' The double flower heads of the cosmos droop pathetically, too heavy for their delicate stems, and the white flowers crumple and turn brown so obviously. This is a plant that needs daily dead-heading. Somehow the yellow foliage of the agastache looks lurid next to its little lavender flowers, which don't put on much of a show even when massed. This plant's proportions and colors look as if they should belong to two different species rather than to each other.

I liked the Chinese hyssop (Agastache rupestris) much better, with its tubular orange flowers set off by gray willow-like leaves that smell of mint and licorice.

Next to the pleasure I took in strawberries and raspberries that bore sweet, ripe fruit clear into mid-September, I think I most enjoyed the showy flowers on two passion vines. I tried out an orange passion flower that I bought on impulse out of a Metropolitan Market parking lot, and its melon-colored flower is one of the prettiest things I've ever seen. While its leaves are large, its tendrils rapacious, and the flowers scarce compared to the rampant foliage, it was worth the space for those incredible flowers. Passiflora 'Lavender Lady' has lacier, less aggressive leaves and plentiful flowers. The blooms are large, deep purple trimmed in black. Still, I have to ask: Why did this vine's egg-shaped fruits come on so prolifically while so few of my tomatoes ripened?

Agapanthus 'Storm Cloud' has huge heads of deep purple flowers that bloom for weeks, providing the dark note the garden needed once the fluffy black peony poppies (Papaver paeoniflorum) faded away in July. I was so pleased with both the color and size of 'Storm Cloud' I don't see a reason to grow any other kind of agapanthus.

Choisya ternata 'Aztec Pearl' has a light and airy presence for an evergreen shrub, with finely dissected, bright-green leaves and starry-white flowers. We'll see how this kind of Mexican orange responds to being trimmed into a hedge, which I plan to do early next spring, but for now its repeated, fragrant bloom throughout the summer and into fall makes it a keeper.

And the sunflowers! I can't get over the marvel of growing such huge, shaggy flowers from seed, in such quantities I can cut them by the armloads to bring indoors. The best performers have been 'The Joker,' a 6-foot-tall bicolor in shades of brown and orange, and the dark-centered 'Red Sun.' Beloved by birds and surrounded by oakleaf lettuces, with scarlet-orange 'Cinderella' pumpkins ripening nearby, these long-stemmed, cheerful beauties made the late-summer garden a delight.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.