September is when a glorybower justifies the whole year. The white flowers come in late summer, fragrant, carried in wide cymes six to nine inches across, and they are pleasant enough on their own terms. What follows is the reason to grow the shrub at all: a turquoise-blue drupe seated in a fleshy calyx that has flushed rose-red and opened out into a star. Persimmons do something comparable with a calyx that refuses to fall, but nothing else in a Southern garden sets that particular blue against that particular red, and the combination looks improbable even standing in front of one.

The genus name is a piece of botanical shrugging. Kleros, a lot or a chance, and dendron, a tree: the tree of fortune, so called because early accounts could not agree whether these plants were medicinally miraculous or entirely useless. Modern work has moved the whole genus into Lamiaceae, the mints, which surprises anyone who learned them as Verbenaceae; the square stems were the clue all along. And the common name that sticks to C. trichotomum is the strangest one in our catalog. Crush a leaf and the smell is peanut butter. This is not a stretch or a piece of folklore, and extension botanists record the observation in those exact words.

The hardy species range across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the northern Philippines, and the tender ones reach into Africa and tropical Asia. Clerodendrum trichotomum is the workhorse for the Southeast, a multi-stemmed deciduous shrub or small tree running somewhere between ten and twenty feet in each direction depending on whose measurements you trust, hardy through zone 7. Give sun for the best flowering, part shade if you must, and soil with some organic matter and some drainage, though in practice these plants grow perfectly well in heavy clay. Mulch the roots deeply going into a first winter. One practical note that catalogs tend to omit: NC State reports that two plants are wanted to set fruit, so if the blue drupes are why you came, and they should be, order a pair.

The honest caution is suckering, and it is not a small one. Glorybowers run from the roots much the way a sumac does, and the two workable answers are to plant in lawn where a mower takes the suckers off, or to plant in a large container. Training a single-stemmed tree is possible and asks for diligent, repeated removal rather than one afternoon's work. No state or invasive plant council list carries the species, so calling them listed invasive would be wrong; calling them aggressive root-suckerers that naturalize readily in our region is simply accurate, and it ought to govern where you site one. Find more late-season flower among our Large Shrubs, unusual company in Curiosities, and further fragrance in Our Favorites.