So many bright flowers. So many strong opinions. Forsythia: the shrub so many love, so many hate.

What's to love? The reliability. That deer don't eat it. The bright color when the landscape is still, overall, soaked in the drear of Winter.

What's to hate? The bright color when the landscape is, overall, still soaked with the drear of Winter. Seeing that same color on every block. The haystack habit. The boring green foliage.

And yet, I grow seven kinds of forsythia. I celebrate it.

The young foliage of many plants is burgundy. It can be as satisfying to know that the color is transitory (so you'd better appreciate it while it lasts) as it is to know that it is permanent (and, so, can ornament your garden all season long).

The feathery leaves of sea-hog's fennel are the first type, burgundy only when young.

Their conversation with the flowers and foliage of 'Fen's Ruby' spurge is even livelier than you'd first think.

Flowers of spice bush teach you to value small details. Though the flowers of the bush I profiled a few days ago are tiny, the fluffiness of their protruding pollen-bearing stalks—the anthers—gives them extra size and presence.

The flowers of this spice bush below seem to lack those anthers—I've checked day by day; they just aren't there—and so their size is noticeably smaller. 

If anything, the effect is even more charming, with yellow-green bits at the base of the emerging green leaves. But why the difference in the flowers in the first place? Why are those of one bush fluffy, and the other, not?