I’ve had three bleeding heart plants over the years, one that I had for years on the lawn side of the driveway bed that has recently disappeared, and two from sister Cate–one looks like the straight species and the other was a gold-leaved variety. The golden one held on for years but disappeared last year near the fence in the orchard bed. The straight species plant is still growing well and blooming well.
I love the interesting flowers of these plants and the delicate foliage. I don’t find them difficult to grow, yet evenually they disappear! So, my 2020 plans for the lone survivor is to fertilize it well and mulch it and hope for the best!
Here is an easy food plant to grow. I just have one shrub of this prolific berry plant and most years it produces more than berries than I can use. The plant is attractive on its own, with good foliage and interesting flowers in April and gorgeous, jewel-like berries in the summer. The berries have a tart, acidic flavor and a large pit, but they are still worth eating or putting in smoothies and desserts. The berries have a lot of lycopene, which is a health booster, along with vitamins A and E.
I’m going to try to propagate this plant in 2020 so I can share it with others and maybe add another one or two in containers around the yard. It looks like semi-softwood cuttings in July/August should be successful. I don’t fertilize it because I don’t want it to grow too much more–it is about the right size now.
There are a few plants in my garden that are classified as noxious weeds by King County. Spurge Laurel is a class C noxious weed, which means “control” is recommended, but not required.
As I’m moving more torwards native plants and understanding how damaging invasive plants are, I’m leaning toward eradicating all of the maleficent marauders in my garden. This is particularly painful with this plant because I really like it! But it is popping up all over my garden, so I can imagine what it might do in a forest setting.
Here are some photos of the plant and flowers. I will be rooting them all out in the next week or two.
A 2018 purchase from Annie’s Annuals, this striking perennial has come into its own this year. The chartreuse flowers make a great backdrop to the spring bulbs around it. The plant doesn’t seem to mind the dry, desolate hell strip that is the memory garden.
My 2020 plans for this plant are to add some good neighbors next to and around it to complement its architectural beauty.
These bulbs were purchased as Alliums, but there was a name change since then. I think I started with a lot of these–maybe 25–a dozen years ago or so, and now I’m down to one! Inevitably, though, I will buy more. It is a gem in the garden, with fairly nondescript oniony leaves and then great stalks of fascinating flowers in May or June.
The flowers get about thirty inches tall, so they stand out in the garden. My 2020 plans for the remaining bulb is to feed it soon to strengthen it and to watch for new bulbs on sale in the fall that I can add to the gardens around the yard.
My favorite garden writer, Christopher Lloyd, called aggressive plants “thugs.” Scutellaria altissima forces me to come up with a stronger term! I purchased seeds of this plant from Pinetree Garden Seeds around 1996 under the name Dracocephalum moldavica. It wasn’t until TODAY (4.20.20) that I actually discovered online what the actual identity of this plant is–the Tall Skullcap, Scutellaria altissima! It appears to be a native plant in the Northeast.
The seeds grew well and I planted a bunch of seedlings along the driveway and they performed well. They get a burst of fresh mint-like foliage in the spring and then cute wands of bluish tiny skullcaps in May. Bees love them. Unfortunately, they are aggressive spreaders. My new term for these invasive types is maleficent marauders. Before long, these maleficent marauders were springing up all over the driveway bed, and in some cracks in the driveway itself. They didn’t seem to be spreading beyond that, so I wasn’t as concerned about them becoming an environmental disaster. However, this last weekend, I walked past the neighbor’s house and noticed that she has a bunch of these plants coming up in a flower bed that is a long way from my driveway bed! Yikes! Time to do some eradicating.
My 2020 plans for these plants are 1) to not let them go to seed and 2) to dig out as many of them as I can and replace them with something more polite–maybe some native columbines and Jacob’s ladders.
These are fairly new additions–I ordered two of them from Annie’s Annuals in fall of 2018. The plants have grown together into a big mounded plant that right now is completely covered with blooms. Last fall, they bloomed for months on end. There is lot to like about a plant that blooms for that long. The foliage, when you can see it through the blooms, is handsome.
Geranium May 2019
I also started seeds of the species Geranium pyrenaicum and ended up with one plant which I transplanted to the garden at the same time I planted the “Bill Wallis” duo. This seedling has very similar if less prolific flowers. The place it seems to be outshining the named variety is in volunteering. In fact, I’m on the verge of rooting it out altogether because there are dozens of babies near the parent plant. Is it generous or dangerous?
For 2020, I’ve already fed these plants with organic food and will follow up in a few months with more food and a shredded leaf topdressing in the fall.
If I remember right, I brought a few of these plants from the rental house where we lived prior to moving here. They are a graceful, vigorous perennial with long leaf stems and small greenish-white flowers dangling underneath in spring. The flowers are subtly sweet-smelling, too, and the plants spread, but pretty politely via rhizomes and mine do not set seeds.
The best thing about these tough beauties is that they survive right next to the big Douglas fir in the yard where they are fully competing with the massive tree and ivy, as well.
For 2020, I’ll do what I always do to support these plants–nothing! They are completely self-sufficient!
There is too much going on to write much about all that is flowering at this bloomiferous time, but I’ll put some photos here and hope to add captions when things slow down.
