A tale of two (or three) from A to Z(abelia)

Abelia x grandiflora cv. at Dallas Botanic Garden in October

I am not sure what rock I've been hiding under, but I was entirely ignorant of the autumn flowering abelias until this fall (or late summer) when I was in the mountains of Central China in late August when we encountered the parent of the hybrid shown above growing on steep ravines. I was transfixed!

 So transfixed I apparently didn't photograph them! What we saw in China was Abelia chinensis, which looks very much like this hybrid, which represents a cross between chinensis and A. uniflora (the latter apparently lost to cultivation). As Jan is demonstrating above, it has a bewitching fragrance....

Everybody who walked by the spectacular hedge alongside the building where I spoke seemed to want to poke their nose in these. Some botanists have tried to lump these taxa under Linnaea, Twinflower--the circumboreal groundcover of subalpine coniferous forests, but the lumping doesn't seem to have stuck. 

We hit this at the perfect time: there are never enough showy late summer blooming shrubs, are there?

When I came back to Denver Botanic Gardens anxious to teach my colleagues about this gem, and of course we were growing it already....when I went out to check the specimens I was underwhelmed--they were no match to Dallas' hedges. And of course the extensive literature about these plants (I blush that I knew nothing about it hitherto) pretty much says it will be marginally hardy in Denver. Next spring I intend to attempt as many different clones (and there are a lot of them) in various parts of my home garden in order to see if that's true!

Zabelia tyaihyoni

There is another plant, once known as Abelia mosanensis, of which we do boast good specimens at the gardens. There is a great deal one can write about this fantastic plant, but the International Dendrological Society does it much more succinctly and better than I could. Do click on that link and you'll find a wonderfully tangled taxonomic mess (almost every website miss-spells the name, by the way!) Except for mine and the I.D.S.!

To recap just a tad--this shrub is extremely rare in northeast South Korea where it's considered at risk of extirpation. Who knows what's happening in North Korea with it.

The Zabelia at Waring House, DBG (Not as floriferous--it had been pruned hard the year before)

It's surprisingly new to cultivation, and still rare in gardens, which is strange since it's a tough customer, and quite graceful and not too big for most gardens. Most significantly, it is EXTREMELY cold hardy (possibly Zone 3), very attractive in form and blossom. And the flowers are also extremely fragrant and produced for a long time. No one seems to mention that the seedpods are rather pretty, and it has wonderful fall color....speaking of which, here is my specimen at home:

It took on some reddish tints a week or so later. I planted this five or so years ago--it took some doing to find a mail order source. Last spring I was admiring it from this spot, taking in the rich fragrance when I noticed something similar in our neighbors' garden: you can see a yellow shrub at the top of this picture: turns out, they'd planted one several years before me and I'd never noticed it until this year--it's twice as big as mine and was part of the source of the rich scent I was noticing. I was torn: should I be pleased at their good taste (where the hell did they find it? No one sells it around here), or pissed I'd been "trumped"...in the old sense of that word, of course!