I saw this at VanDusen Botanical Garden last week but couldn't find the tag, and then today I couldn't find the plant. It's very striking with the purple leaves and small pointed purple flowers with white threads hanging off the tips. Fruits around 1.5cm; leaves, opposite, around 8cm, maybe a bit more. Plant was maybe around 60cm tall flopped over. This is all from memory (so not exactly exact). The leaves remind me of basil, but the stems look round. I can't find any pictures of basil fruits and I don't know what else to guess. Thanks.
Sure they're berries, and not unripe capsules that will dry out and split open? Is it a shrub, or a herbaceous plant? Couple of possibilities to check, Scrophularia sp., and Hypericum sp., but there's probably several more options.
Penstemon ' Dark Towers'? http://www.flickr.com/photos/carllewis/4317611783/ http://www.freeimagefinder.com/detail/5978843495.html
Thanks, everyone. Penstemon digitalis looks right, with the saltcedar's second photo link for 'Dark Towers' being the most convincing (photo is from flickr). 'Husker Red' was selected (not sure by whom) as perennial plant of the year in 1996, and is good for wet climates, so entirely possible it's that cultivar, though the leaf photo for that at the first link is not all that convincing and the flickr photos for that cultivar show a lot more green everywhere, particularly on the sepals. The purple sepals add to the impact of this. As far as I can see, only those two people and I have thought to photograph those things. I see from the first link that these have a "thyrse" style of inflorescence, with " two secondary stems called cymes at each node of the main inflorescence stem". Michael, I wasn't sure if it was a shrub or herbaceous plant. I thought the latter, but the clump had a shrubby appearance and I couldn't remember. And I guess I should have realized they were seed capsules, but I didn't understand what I was looking at.
Stock of 'Husker Red' has been on local market for some time, appears to vary as though growers are providing non-uniform seedlings, with some being more purple than others. You should be able to ask at the counter on the way to the library etc. at Van Dusen and find out what they think they have.
I didn't find anyone to help me today, but I did find my original plant, and next to it, I found another with the label 'Husker Red'. Two labels, actually, but nothing on my original plant. I don't think my original plant looks like this. For one thing, the inflorescences are more upright. That the plants are further along in their development also makes them look less similar. These are so hard to photograph, I can see why there are so few photos of them available. Here is another 'Husker Red' nearby with a label. This is the original plant I posted. It's much healthier looking, yet the inflorescences are pendulous rather than upright. It's far enough from the first plant above, and separated by some other plant, that the label clearly doesn't belong to this one.
Thanks, Andrey. From How to Grow Penstemon Perennial Plants (is that a magazine?): I guess next summer it will be easy enough to tell, white vs. pink, if I don't manage to get the info from VanDusen before that. I notice most other sites say 'Dark Towers' is taller.
The Penstemon at VanDusen were all labelled today, and there are indeed 'Dark Towers' as well as 'Husker Red' (I know you've been waiting to hear about these). I think this is the clump I posted last November. The 'Dark Towers' were all keeled over, though the flowers were not drooping the way I mentioned the seed heads being. The third photo shows a few seed heads already. The fourth photo makes me dizzy, but I don't think it's (very) out of focus, and it shows the hairs on the stalks. These leaves were intermediate in colour between the two colours on the 'Husker Red'. On the site, these flowers were very noticeably darker purple than the 'Husker Red' ones. Here are the 'Husker Red'. I don't notice as many, if any, hairs on these stalks. There was only the one sign for the clump with green leaves and the clump with the very dark leaves (next to each other in the second photo below). The text I quoted above says "dark maroon foliage", but there were a few clumps with just green leaves that were clearly marked as 'Husker Red'.
Probably the variation is due to them being seedlings instead of a uniform, vegetatively propagated clone. Other common purple-leaved cultivars that have not been kept true-to-type by commercial growers are Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood' and Heuchera micrantha var. diversifolia 'Palace Purple'. I have seen both presented here as obvious mixed batches of seedlings including poor forms ranging to bronze and even nearly all green.