Front Yard Little Henry Sweetspire - September 2019

In all of the [garden diary] posts I've made here over the past three seasons, I seem to have failed to inventory most of our front yard shrubs.  I've posted photos of the buds on some of our hydrangeas, but have skipped over the rest.  Over the course of the next few days, I'm attempting to put down some entries here so I can reference them in the coming seasons.  First up is this Little Henry Sweetspire.  It sits in a little bed right beside our front walk adjacent to our driveway.

We had it put in by Green Grass as part of our initial landscape plan and haven't thought much about it over the past few years.  There were three small plants here when we started and now you can see that it has grown and matured into a nice sized shrub.  It has some long, leggy shoots that have emerged this season as well as some underground shoots that seem to be more rhizome-driven.

I have read online that we can take one of these rhizome spreaders to create a new plant - and that's something that I'll aim to try next season.

This puts out some tube-like white flowers (you can see them here on the Monrovia plant listing) and it also puts on a little Fall show with red/orange leaves.  I think that it can also be shaped/pruned into a more formal shape, but for now, I'm just going to clean up the driveway side and keep it contained to the bed while retaining it's more informal shape.

I'll try to grab a photo of it in her "Fall Splendor" (if it happens this year) and post what it looks like naked later this Winter.