An Iowa Garden

Is there such a word as "Adonisless"? If not, there should be, as that's unaccountably the state I find myself in again this spring. Adonis amurensis is an early-blooming wildflower of Japan, where it also is often sold in small pots, so that it will bloom at the New Year.It's given name there is Fukujusoo, which apparently means "a plant of happy fortune and long life". It is a member of the buttercup family, with ferny, green foliage and bright golden flowers, which arises and blooms very early in the spring, with the crocuses. It is a spring ephemeral, so dies back in the heat of summer and disappears, which for the most part I don't mind, as I prefer a bare spot to seeing a plant flop about in slow agony in the heat like some of the other cool climate plants do; I will allow that my track record, however, in managing bare spots is not good, as more often than not a bare spot around here becomes the recipient of some hulking, invasive plant that a fellow gardener sent home with me. It is a rite of spring that sophisticated gardeners in this country ( a category in which nobody in their right senses would place me) start rhapsodizing about their Adonis bursting from the ground with a blaze of golden flowers. It is equally a rite of spring around here that I suddenly realize another year has gone by without me adding this plant to my garden... I think I am destined to be Adonisless. For that matter, I have been wondering for years why I have never come up with a plant of Corydalis solida. After seeing several plants of heavenly blue Corydalis flexuosa wither into extinction (though one little specimen stubbornly persists), I pretty much gave up on the genus, but am now slowly adding other species in this group that do survive here: lutea, ochroleuca, leucanthema, and what is probably a flexuosa hybrid, Blackberry Wine... but still no solida. I must look into it.