My “simple question”—really the same question, asked in two phases—was to Marco Polo Stufano, a far more expert and fearless garden-maker. I’d lost one trunk of a very large, wide-reaching old apple tree last fall, exposing a large circle of shade perennials to the sun.
Do I have to move all thehellebores, the gold Hakonechloa grass and other things that once enjoyed the apple’s shade, I’d asked then? After some discussion and some plant-shopping, I’d begun the remediation with a female fringe tree, Chionanthus virginicus (a native with fragrant white June flowers, good fall color and dark blue fruits).
This spring I called for help again, still fretting about the same spot:
Because the fringe “tree,” more of a large shrub, will never really fill the entire role the apple once did, are there some shrubs I could combine with it? (Read: me, still trying to avoid digging up all those shade perennials.)
He didn’t miss a beat.
“Deciduous azaleas,” he said, “with yellow and orange flowers.”
my chronic case of azalea-itis‘HAVE YOU GONE MAD?’ I thought for a moment, and then: “Why not?” The first reaction was a scar from childhood: a severe case of chronic azalea-itis. The garden I grew up in in Queens was packed with a nasty mess of one of every shade of azalea, from hottest to palest pink, reddish to lavender and even white, with yellow
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