We are absolutely ecstatic to announce that this year’s Wayside Gardens Collector’s Edition is now available on our website. Unfortunately, we no longer have any copies of this publication. We’ll keep you up to date throughout 2014 for any new additions. We got to work with the amazing Ken Druse (I listen to his podcast, Real Dirt, every Saturday, and so should you), which was a tremendous honor and pleasure for everyone at Wayside Gardens. The collection includes some of the most amazing plants I’ve ever seen, both woody and herbaceous. Some of these plants are truly unique, and beautiful beyond almost anything currently in my garden (I’ll be including some of this new collection in my garden this year, you can be sure of that). With this great collection finally being released, I can’t help but take the chance to write about a few of my favorites. Making the cover of our Collector’s Edition catalog this year is the Epimedium Ogisui. It’s a stunning flower that, as a great bonus, will throw out those elegant blooms very early in the season.
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of flowering vines, or that Clematis is one of my favorite flowers. It should be no surprise, then, that the flower that excites me the most in our new collection is the Clematis ‘Haku Ookan.’ Besides producing blooms of an amazing purple reminiscent of the popular Clematis Bourbon, it is one of the most prolific bloomers we’ve ever seen. It also has two blooming seasons, which is something that I can rarely resist. Once a vine has stopped blooming in mid-summer, I almost never remember that it will start blooming again later in the year, making the second season a fantastic surprise.
With more and more gardeners becoming deeply concerned with the effects that their gardening have on the environment, planting native flowers is a great option for nearly everyone. We are offering as part of this collection one of my favorite native 
plants, Trillium erecta. This flower’s stunning color and unique blooms make it a great accent perennial. It could even hold its own as the centerpiece of most gardens. It is actually a red flower with pale green sepals that make it seem like a distinctly two-color bloom. It is native to woodland areas up and down the Eastern US, all the way from Georgia to Ontario, and I have often encountered these while hiking in the hills of Georgia and Tennessee. I wondered for years what these great flowers were, and this year I’ll be planting some of my own.