I have four Purple Dome asters in my garden. I started with two which grew quickly and vigorously. I split them each in half a few years back and will have more this next spring to give away. They have excellent color and no mildew and are quite stocky with thickly green stalks, different than the other asters I have had. I also have two other smallish asters Wood's Blue & Professor Kippenberg. I loved Lady in Black but it was too big and loose growing as David said. I may try his suggestion of Prince for another dark foliaged aster. I am also inundated with wild white asters (large blousy cloud-like bushes of them) in lots of places in my garden. Pretty but have to yank them out or they would overtake the world. I guess they came in with the birds, because nobody else near me ever plants a flower. My only problem with asters is the bunnies. They love love love Purple Dome, eating the outside stems down to nubs. Fortunately it is so vigorous that it doesn't hurt the display much. As for anemones I agree with Honorine Jobert as a spectacular looking fall garden plant, but I am one of those that had great difficulty establishing it in my garden. It took multiple tries to get one plant going in my garden and it took my husband digging into in the spring (thinking it was Maple seedlings) to get it to start blooming. Once it took off it was/is a great plant. Another anemone that no one has mentioned is a small one called Snowdrop anemone (A. sylvestris), a spring bloomer, that reblooms for me in the fall. It started reblooming after a few years in the garden, something I never expected and puts on a pretty little display with small blooms very similar to Honorine Jobert next to my patio. It blooms in spring just after Anemone blanda and its pretty dark green deeply lobed leaves stay in perfect mounds all season. It starts reblooming a week or two before HJ and makes a nice counterpoint to it. It's a great groundcover anemone for smallish areas.

Mine generally stand up okay, but I don't consider them very winter hardy here. I treat them more like an annual, with good color and a nice long bloom time, that occasionally surprises me by overwintering. If they grew five years for me, they would probably flop. Anyway, since yours live, you might try cutting them back by half when they get about a foot high. Pinching would probably work too, but I'm too lazy, usually just like to give plants a quick haircut with hand hedge clippers. I'm not sure when you would want to stop pinching, since these are fairly early bloomers for an aster.

Aster divaricatus (native to Missouri) is also an "earlier" blooming native that does well in part shade to shade. Supposed to begin bloom in August. Also, Aster ericoides 'Blue Star' is supposed to start blooming a bit before the late-blooming asters. Also a native. My aster tartaricus bloomed earlier than most asters, too, and I had tons of hairstreaks, Bordered Patches, and checkerspots nectaring on it. You might want to consider something other than asters for late bloom, that bloom before frost, though, like solidago. I had a frikartii hybrid that bloomed early, like early summer, and was gone by the July. Don't know if it was just that particular hybrid, or something else. But, the bloom period was very short. Susan

boday, I've grown this aster for about 20 years and it's never winterkilled even in winters with little or no snow covering. It flowers over a long period of time, though does not produce a mass of blooms at any one time. The plant makes a good companion to hydrangeas such as 'Little Lamb' and 'Lime Light'. Terrance