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One of our treasured Hepatica selections rarely offered due to jealous hoarding and nature's snail-like pace. These woodland delights are one of our favorites, so much so that they have a whole house dedicated to their culture! This form is particularly petaliferous (a Far Reaches Farm linguistic original) with "botanical blue" flowers rimmed in white.

When you think Hydrangea you mayyyy think climber if you are particularly nutty botanophile, but certainly unlikely. I can all but guarantee you that you aren't thinking both climber and native to Chile, but here we are with one that fits just that bill. Glossy evergreen leaves and plumes of white to pale-yellow flowers composed almost entirely of fertile florets. Rare in the UK and nearly non-existent in the US, this is one to cure those made nauseous by the endless sugar-sweet hybrids churned out by the big nurseries and breeders that represent the genus in common parlance.

It's difficult to talk eloquently let alone persuasively about a plant newly collected and how it will appear in the various seasons and how well it will perform in the garden. We don't know a lot about this November 2011 collection from a shrub at Lao Cai, Above Silver Waterfall, Vietnam at 2150 meters. We can say it won't grow in Des Moines, Iowa or Black Duck, Minnesota but it will likely be happy as a clam in Seattle. These are young but sturdy seedlings which will really need greenhouse overwintering this first winter.

At this young stage, they bear resemblance to Schefflera alpina and S. chapansis but since they were collected by Aaron Floden, we're smart enough to know that if he doesn't know than we don't know. It's kind of like that Donald Rumsfeld thing where there are known knowns and known unknowns and if we know we don't know than we know more than those who don't know but know they do. Generally I found little palatable about him but I did find myself defending him over this quote as it made perfect sense to me. Somehow seeing it in print makes it seem less defensible and my veracity more questionable.