I have never had this plant and had no idea what to expect. Breck's description said it would be 30" to 36" high and would have red flowers.
Since I had dug out a new roadside garden which had a lot of empty space, I decided to plant it there in front of a Ninebark shrub.
This is the new roadside space in 2013 just before I planted a Ninebark shrub and two Golden Cypress shrubs and the Japanese Bottlebrush. The Bottlebrush came up in 2013, but did nothing.
This is the same garden in 2014. I added some dahlias to fill in the space and some of J's favorite annuals -- marigolds.
I was quite happy with this garden in 2014. The Japanese Bottlebrush was still alive and I expected to see flowers soon. You can see the Japanese Bottlebrush in the center of the marigolds--still very tiny, but alive. After waiting all summer to see flowers, I was pretty discouraged when no flower emerged.
In the spring of 2015, I saw some green leaves emerge and noted that it survived another brutal Michigan winter.
I had pretty much forgotten about it, until a few weeks ago when I noticed how tall it was --
already over 2 ft. tall.
Today I was thrilled to see that the dozens of little green nubs on the ends of the branches had sprouted into tiny little flowers
The plant is way taller than I expected and the flowers are not the "red" color that I thought they would be...I am happy about that because the purple color they are blends nicely with the Ninebark.
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