We brought a start of this plant from our rental house, so we’ve had it 25 years in this garden. It is a survivor, living on in a somewhat shady position, assaulted by bindweed, with little water or fertilizer. Every year, it blooms reliably with its showy, slightly fragrant flowers.

My future plans for this plant are to divide it and move a division out into a better position where it can be taken care of and really put on a flower display.

I feel very lucky to have one of these plants blooming now in the greenhouse. I started seeds in early spring, then transplanted about five healthy seedlings to small pots and transitioned them to the greenhouse. It was too cold and wet for them in there and they damped off, one by one, until I thought they had all joined the great compost heap in the sky. But hidden under some more boisterous seedlings, this one vine hung on. When the weather started warming up, so did this plant. It is by no means vigorous or robust, but it has grown at a fair clip and surprised me last weekend when I saw a couple of perfect white flowers open up.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to coddle it a bit and hope to winter in over–I’m hoping it is a tender perennial. Then, I will put it in a hanging basket and coax a bunch more of these striking blooms from it next summer.

In the past, I’ve often ordered the inexpensive perennial mixes from mail order catalogs–fifteen perennials for $9.99 or something like that. The value isn’t always there. When the plants arrive, they can be tiny and needy, and barely better than starting plants from seed. One year, I got a mix that included three Phlox paniculata plants. They didn’t look like much, but I stuck them out in the driveway bed and watered them now and then. It took a couple of years before they bloomed. In another year, they got pretty showy. The standout of the three is “Laura.” She has full lavender flowers with white eyes and makes a grand show.

Since I haven’t identified the other two clones planted in the same place, I’ll include their photos here with Laura. I didn’t imagine I would end up with a clashing color combo, thinking most of the hybrid phloxes would complement each other. Boy, was I wrong. The most red of the three is just red enough to clash pretty badly with the other two. The most robust one you see in the photos is also the most fragrant, sweetly scenting the entire driveway and lawn .

My 2020 plans for these plants are to water them during hot spells and enjoy their bright (and clashy) colors and sweet scents.

Coneflowers are so common and popular today that they might be considered trite or overused. Catalogs abound with myriad cultivars. The excellent substance and coloring of these flowers earn them a place in any sunny border. They don’t seem as common in Seattle as they probably are in the midwest or east coast. In fact, the three plants I have in the memory garden are the only ones I know of in the neighborhood.

My plants resemble the standard species. I don’t recall if they have a cultivar name. I grew them from seed in 2017 for planting out in the memory garden. The cones of coneflowers are my favorite part–the color is the perfect contrast to the petals and they glow differently with various sun exposures.

These plants are very self-sufficient, including being significantly drought tolerant. I sprinkle them a few times in the hottest weeks along with the other plants in the memory bed. I fertilize them in spring to encourage them to bulk up and bloom more–it seems to be working. They are much showier this year than last.

One of my newest plants, I started this from seed in spring 2020. Several germinated and I’ve kept them moving along, not expecting flowers this first year and intending to winter them over in the greenhouse and see if I might be blessed with Devil’s trumpets in 2021. The biggest of the seedlings had other ideas, however, and threw a bud and flowered this week (July 15th). It was gorgeous to look at, but I never caught much of a whiff of any fragrance. However, I didn’t get out at night to check on it, so when the next flower opens, I’ll set some alarms!

The species, D. metel, has an interesting provenence. It is unknown in the wild and according to Wikipedia:

…it seems clear that D. metel is essentially a collection of cultivars and recent critical authors have found it impossible to recognise a wild type for the species. This view is supported by the tuberculate capsules found in D. metel (as compared with the spinose capsules of other species) and the retention of seeds on the placenta, at least in cultivars ‘Fastuosa’ and ‘Chlorantha’. Both of these traits suggest cultivar selection…The variants of D. metel have been widely grown as ornamentals over a long period of time…There is no evidence that the variants arose from horticultural plant breeding in the Old World…These facts taken together strongly suggest that D. metel was a well-established cultivated species with a range of forms in its place of origin and that these forms arrived ready-made in Europe.^[4]

2020 might see me potting this plant on yet again to a bigger pot and feeding and watering it religiously in the hopes of coaxing more spectacular blooms from it. I’ll do the same with the other seedlings to see if they catch up and bloom, too, then I’ll tuck them in the greenhouse for the winter and hope they come back bigger and better in year two.

From sister Cate about seven years ago, these spectacular cormous perennials make a big splash in the orchard garden every July. There are so many traits to like about these plants–the foliage is clean and contrasts well with mounded plants, the flowers buds unfurl in a very artistic way, the flowers themselves are plentiful, brilliant scarlet with yellow inside. From a care standpoint, the only important thing (and the one I fail at consistently) is that my plants need staking. They tend to flop, maybe because they are in part sun.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to clip some flowers for the house and set up a better staking system. I also plan to peel away some of the corms in late winter to pot up for sales and gifts.

The most hated weed in my garden is also a beautiful plant…hedge bindweed has lovely white flowers this time of year. The problem with the plant, like all weeds, is that it grows where it isn’t wanted. It twines around all the other plants in the garden, overwhelming them and becoming tough to extricate. Late in the season, the plant sends out long exploratory underground stems–they can stretch ten feet or more, and that’s how they gain ground throughout the yard. They are in virtually every flower bed we have and the only thing that keeps them at bay is shade.

My 2020 plans for these plants is to cut them off at ground level wherever I find them and to cut the wandering invaders off as soon as I see them. It will take years to root them out entirely, but I’ll keep working on it.

The miraculous wonderberry started as a fun seed starting experiment and has stayed with me through self-seeding for five or six years now. One of the wonders of wonderberries is how seedlings come up in the worst soil in the dryest raised bed and still manage to thrive and produce sweet berries.

Solanum is a fun plant family, with odd poisonous, prickly, edible, and ornamental members. I was very happy to be able to germinate the wonderberry seeds and grow some on to produce berries. The berries are beautiful and sweet and the plants produce them right up until frost.

My 2020 plans for these plants are to water the volunteers that have come up in the raised garlic bed and to nurture one that came up in a pot in the greenhouse. They are really such generous, easy plants–having them around makes me smile.

When one of my more robust Hippeastrums bloomed, I didn’t pay much attention to the seed pod. And months later, little Hippeastrum plants started springing up in random pots in the greenhouse. I realized then that maybe these plants are that difficult to grow from seed, so I went online and found some seeds for a rare species, H. mandonii. Two of the seeds germinated and I ended up with two strong seedlings.

Since then, however, the plants have gone through strange phases. The main bulbs both died off, but there were several offsets all around them. However, the offsets stayed dinky for a long time. This year, one pot seems ful of dead-looking offsets. I repotted them into new soil and cleaned them up a bit, but they still haven’t leafed out green at all. The second pot, however, is very much alive and well.

My 2020 plans for these plants are to baby them a bit more and hope to coax greater growth and the grand prize, flowers! I imagine flowers are still at least two years away, but from what I’ve seen, they are worth waiting for…

Our Douglas fir is the biggest star of the garden–really BIG! We guess the tree to be at least as old as the house (70 years) and at least 80 feet tall, with a trunk eight feet around at chest height. When we were shopping for a house to buy, I remember hugging this tree the first time I laid eyes on it. There are dozens of trees of similar age and size throughout our Haller Lake neighborhood. They host eagles who come for quick visits until the mobbing crows send them on their way. They host crows nests, bushtit nests, flocks of feeding chickadees, and dozens of other species.

There are some misconceptions about needle evergreens, and the biggest one is that they are somehow less messy than deciduous trees. A tree as big as our Douglas fir dumps millions of needles and pollen cones every year. In addition, there are thousands of cones that drop from the tree, and hundreds of branches snap off in windstorms. As much as possible, we try to tuck anything that the tree drops back under the tree so it can be nourished as it would be in nature.

My 2020 plans for this behemoth are to cut the ivy away from its trunk completely and then us it as the keystone plant in my native plant garden. It provides shade and organic matter to the shrubs and perennials underneath it. It also provides some challenging competition for water and nutrients with its expansive root system. Surprisingly, though, many plants have evolved to grow under trees like this and I’m starting to bring them in.