An Iowa Garden

When I was a boy, I often heard it said that so and so, referring to some young man known for causing problems, was "born trouble". Well, if a plant could be described in the same terms, this is it for me. Mind you, I never asked for this grief; I swear I don't know where this plant even came from in the first place. I was just innocently walking along a path in the garden last September, when I suddenly noticed it blooming away in the back of a crowded flower bed. It was no mean feat having failed to notice it before, as at this point it was about three foot tall, looming over its neighboring plants in a most un-neighborly fashion, leaning on a poor fairy bells like a drunken sailor. I found a hand-lettered label (with what looks suspiciously like my writing on it), and on googling it, found that it appeared to be a Japanese woodland plant. I put a picture and short piece about it on this blog, and thought no more about it, as it really, to me, was not the most drop-dead gorgeous plant to ever come down the pike; its flower spikes sort of look like worn-out bottle brushes. Well, it's blooming again, and I stopped and looked at it anew, and this year I have to admit I'm more favorably impressed, from three standpoints: first of all, in a shady garden there is not exactly a slew of competition in the blooming department in September; second, the flowers are just covered with bumblebees; and third, the flowers have a very pleasing perfume... sort of like a light, grassy butterfly bush. I took the above picture, looked at my past posting to get the plant's name, Leucoseptrum stelliperum, and googled it in to get some more information on it... well, the only entry Google came up with, was this obscure blog called "An Iowa Garden". Either I had the only plant in the world, or more likely I'd mis-spelled it in my posting; in fact I found it's "Leucosceptrum"... how embarassing... foreverafter, when any poor soul mis-spells the genus trying to look it up, they'll get my blog. I guess I felt better, when I then found out I'd also mis-spelled the species name, which should be "stellipilum"... anybody who is that far off when they google it, deserves to get my blog. It didn't help my ego though, when I started looking at pictures and figured out that my plant doesn't appear to be Leucosceptrum stellipilum anyway (which has lavender flowers), but rather Leucosceptrum japonicum (the Japanese shrub mint, which has off-white flowers). Oh, fiddle!