An Iowa Garden

The internet and internet search engines are wondrous inventions, making available a cornucopia of useful and accurate knowledge... but then there's my blog. I would be quite embaressed to tell you how many Google searches on different plants will lead you to my blog, and leave you with a big dose of misinformation, misidentification, confusion, or a liberal portion of each.
My latest whopper is pictured above; I blame it all on a certain well-known nursery that shall remain nameless here as long as they keep giving me free bonus plants with my orders. It was described as a variegated leaf form of Japanese wood mint, mightily uncommon at that time in gardens in this country, and yet a delight to man and bees in the late fall. The label read "Leucoseptum stelipelum". I couldn't find anything under that name, but decided after looking on the internet that it must be "Leucoseptum steliperum", and floated that name out into the vast internet database, along with a picture. I knew that at that time the plant was quite rare in this country, but it's a bad sign when a search using the name you used turns up four results, one of which is yours, so I decided the proper spelling must be "Leucoseptum stellipillum", which had a lot more entries, though not an overwhelming number. I then upgraded the name to "Leucoseptum stellipilum", which had even more entries, then recently the plant has become more available in this country, so I found it was actually "Leucosceptum stellipilum". Great... after a almost a half dozen mis-fires, and a flood of bad information added to the web, I had the right name. The only minor hitch is that it's supposed to have pink-lilac flowers, and the flowers on my plant are... yellow.
This spring, by chance I came across a non-variegated leaf form of Leucosceptum stellipilum, and it blooms later, its leaves are coarser-toothed and more ovoid and it has pink flowers... it is a different plant. A large light bulb has just gone on with the realization that my original plant is probably Leucosceptum japonicum, which has... yellow flowers.
So, come to my blog for pretty pictures, for the occasional funny story, or a tale about kittens or turtles; if it's facts you're interested in, go to the library.