Last fall’s mystery plant, which I identified as a Euphorbia, has risen again. Its leaves are limier and its bracts are yellow. (Hmm, I guess this one is not Euphorbia ‘Rubra‘ or ‘Excalibur’, as I speculated previously. )

Sunday I strolled the section of yellow-flowered perennials at Allandale until I spotted a twin to my mystery Euphorbia; it’s a ‘Polychroma’. Lovely — yellow in the spring and reddish in the fall. (If only all plants could pull off that color change.) I brought home the twin and planted it.

Two Euphorbia polychroma, one on each side of the sidewalk, shading the roots of the clematis that climb the arbor, seemed… stuck out there and lonely. So I went back and bought four more. (They’ll make two sets of triplets when planted.)

And that pretty well captures how my gardening “design” process works. Not much advance planning, it evolves one tiny decision at a time.