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aconitum

March 3, 2009

This is a you can’t live with it, you can’t live without it perennial, an Aconitum I don’t even know the name of that I have tried to dig out of a particular bed for more than a decade. It’s probably some kind of A. carmichaelii (the leaves are divided but not terribly finely, and it gets to 4 feet or even taller each year, despite the abuse I offer). In mid-October, and sometimes lasting right through Thanksgiving, it talks back, opening the most vivid purple flowers against a fading backdrop of hot foliage in the landscape around it. Its own leaves then turn wine-red and eventually drop. Deep-rooted and tenacious, definitely poisonous, and also irresistibly beautiful right this very special minute in the growing year.

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