Hummingbird Bush, Summersweet

Last summer I put pictures on this blog of a bush my friend gave me.  She called it a hummingbird bush, but the hummingbird bushes in my plant reference did not resemble it--especially since most were red.

It has pretty white blossoms that appear fairly late in the summer.  It has shiny green leaves that sometimes stay through the winter.  This year they didn't appear till May, and I was beginning to think it had died.

To get to the point of this blog, I was reading my new Birds and Blooms magazine today and found a bush called summersweet, or Clethra alnifolia,  The description and picture match my flowering shrub.

The bush was fully covered with these seeds in the  winter.   I didn't get a  picture of the full display of the seeds since the green was beginning to come  out.  They are brown, not purple as it appears in the picture.