Masterworts have long deserved garden space for their quiet charms and length of bloom time. Astrantia major 'Sunningdale Variegated' is a livelier version, with foliage in cream and two shades of green.

A perennial I've particularly enjoyed over the past couple of seasons seems to be the "It" plant of 2001, repeated in nearly every garden I've toured this summer. But I have to admit I've been surprised to see a plant of such quiet charms as Astrantia major 'Sunningdale Variegated' hit the celebrity circuit. I first started growing masterworts because their airy little flowers bloom a long time, take up little space and last for weeks in a vase. Their rather coarse foliage was the only drawback, and with this cultivar the foliage is the asset. The subdued white flowers tinged with pink are the same as the species, but the leaves are a stunning combination of lime green, forest green and cream. The foliage colors up best in full sun, and while all types of A. major prefer some watering in midsummer, they can put up with dry soil once established.

Another variegated perennial, Phlox paniculata 'Becky Towe,' I saw for the first time this year and ended up bringing home in multiples. It's shorter and flashier than most variegated phloxes, its rosey-salmon-peachy-colored blooms centered with a darker-pink eye and shown off by butter-yellow leaves with green stripes down the mid-rib. I have them clustered around a spreading Rosa mutabalis, whose flowers morph through a similar color on their way from watermelon to cream. It sounds kind of vulgar, but out in the garden, backed by the steely-blue foliage of Melianthus major, it looks OK. Most days I think it looks pretty good.

Now In Bloom Phygelius x rectus blooms through the autumn, holding aloft long, narrow flowers with frilly flares and prominent stamen. It is a lank, upright, long-blooming shrub that grows to 5 feet, but dies back to the roots in cold winters. 'Moonraker' has pale yellow flowers; 'African Queen' has red flowers with orange lobes and soft yellow inside the throats of the blooms.

One of my favorite container plantings this year is also one of the simplest. (There's a lesson I should remember.) I stuffed a short, fat, dark-blue pot full of the beguilingly named Cupea ignea 'Bat Face' (cigar flower is its common name). By late summer the pot was bristling with stiff, glossy foliage and tubular little flowers in dark purple set off by frills of hot scarlet. All on so delicate a scale that it could never be considered the least vulgar.

I spotted Rudbeckia occidentalis 'Green Wizard' on a garden tour, and tracked it down to plant on my sunny back bank. This perennial has the large black central cone of a traditional black-eyed Susan, but instead of colorful petals, the dark eye is surrounded by green sepals. It makes a stunning cut flower, and its unusual coloration catches your eye in the garden as well.

To go back to verging-on-the-vulgar for a moment, you'd be perfectly satiated with the color of the tender fuchsia 'Firecracker,' even if it never produced its narrow-tubed orangey-pink flowers. This is an entire color scheme of a plant, with pink-veined leaves mottled in varying shades of green, margined with creamy pink. I planted a bunch in a sage-green pot, toned down a bit by the addition of Helichrysum petiolare, whose felty little leaves perfectly match the lightest color of green in the fuchsia's foliage. I've had to shoo the hummingbirds away from the fuchsia to water that pot. They seem to love the same flowers I love as they skim right over to my newest salvia, the August-blooming Salvia muelleri, whose royal-purple flowers are nearly as attractive to the hummers as those of 'Firecracker.'

Valerie Easton is a horticultural librarian and writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine. She is the co-author of "Artists in Their Gardens" from Sasquatch Books. Her e-mail address is vjeaston@aol.com. Jacqueline Koch is a free-lance photographer who lives on Whidbey Island.