I started fortnight lily seeds about ten years ago when I was on a major kick of growing bulbous plants from seed. This plant grew quickly and flowered in about three years from seed. It has gone through tough times the last few years, having died back in its pot. It grew back well this year but hasn’t bloomed for a while.

The flowers are a showy mix of white, yellow, and blue, in a graceful, open iris-like form. The leaves are pure iris–spear-like and plentiful (when happy).

My future plans for this plant are to plant it into the memory garden. Seattle is considered a Zone 8 hardiness zone, and this plant is supposed to be hard to Zone 8, so I’ll give it a chance to take up some room in that sunny bed. I think it might really like that.

The inside-out flower is aptly named, as the flowers do look like they’be been turned inside out. This is a lovely native ground cover that I added to the Douglas fir bed about ten years ago. I don’t remember where the plant came from originally.

The foliage is airy and graceful and the flowers come up in May on tall spikes and add more air charm. The plant is not ephemeral for me, in that it doesn’t disappear in the dry summer–the foilage stays put almost year-round.

My future plans for this plant are to grab divisions from around its edges in the spring so I have Vancouveria to share with friends and neighbors.

This unusual clematis came to me via a mail order catalog about seven years ago. It has had some good years with lots of flowers and some much less successful years. This year, for example, the pot it was in on the patio dried out early on and the vine never really got going. Then, when it was finally getting some growth, it came down with a bad case of powdery mildew.

Despite the challenges, the flowers are very worthwhile. They are an unusal shape and hue and are extraordinarily beautiful.

My future plans for this vine that can’t really hold itself up is to add some better soil to its pot and a decent trellis to fasten it to so that next year Rooguchi will cover itself with blue bells.

Leon brought home a cutting of this plant about three years ago. I potted it up and pretty much forgot about it. Apparently thriving on neglect, that cutting grew quickly into a blooming-sized plant.

The flowers are really pretty, too, and it can get whitish berries, too, but I don’t think mine set any fruit the year if bloomed.

My future plans for this trailing plant are to repot it into a bigger terra cotta pot next spring. It seems to grow pretty well on the fence along the patio, so I’ll put it up on the fence again in the spring and see if it rewards me with flowers in 2021.

I’ve liked snapdragons for a long time and I’ve grown them from seed many times over the years. They tend to be more perennial here in Seattle, but they don’t live forever for me. The latest snapdragon seeds I started were of a hanging basket variety and the plants are very different–very bushy and daintier than the upright types. My last remaining plant did not bloom well this year, but it was on the shady patio.

I don’t seem to have any photos of this plant blooming, but the flowers are white and yellow. Assuming it survives the winter outside, I’ll move the pot to the sunny patio next year and feed the plant to see if I can coax into throwing a lot more flowers.

Another childhood memory plant, our neighbor, Mrs. Hardy, had a large Mahonia shrub on the property line when I was growing up. As kids, we believed that the berries were poisonous. They were good for coloring our various potions and mud pies. I remember finding out the hard way that walking barefoot anywhere near an Oregon grape is a bad idea–the leaf thorns become extra agressive after the leaves fall off and dry.

I added one Oregon grape to my new native plant garden in April 2020. It is a decent-sized start, at around three feet tall, and blooming-sized.

My future plans for Oregon grapes are to keep an eye on its spread and enjoy the flowers and fruit in the coming years.

Foxgloves are growing wild around Seattle and I grew up knowing their name and seeing them in all the abandoned fields and old gravel roads when we’d venture on walks or drives. The wild one here is Digitalis purpurea. I have grown that and hybrids of it in the garden here for years, including the quick-blooming “Foxy” strain, and a mix that I recently got from Chiltern’s in England.

I put some seedlings from the Chiltern’s mix in the memory garden last year. They didn’t bloom fully, as I think they were too young, but they will bloom big in 2021. I hope they don’t block any of the flowering bulbs that are planted underneath.

My future plans for foxgloves are to pretty much ignore them. As non-native invaders, I’ll let these bloom and then eliminate them. There may be a few seedlings to deal with down the road, of course, but these plants haven’t been weedy for me, just pretty and polite.

Another great native plant, fringecup is a fun understory plant in our local forests and clearings. It has fresh-looking foliage and interesting, cup-like flowers that grow in tall spikes in the summer. I added a couple of these plants to the native garden in April 2020 and they have done well.

My fringecups set seed this year and I left them on and tossed some around–it’ll be interesting to see if any germinate. I’ll probably purchase some seeds, regardless, to get some more of these growing–they are a fun native that add a bit of elegance to the garden.

Back in the 70s when I was just a kid, I remember stores selling piggyback plants in the houseplant section. Later on, when we moved to Kent and I had access to an undisturbed forest to wander in, I found these plants growing on the forest floor! It still fascinates me that a temperate plant like Tomiea can be grown in houses.

Now that I’m focused on native plants in my own yard, the piggyback plant is back in my life. I added one plant to the garden last year and it has grown well. I never paid attention to the flowers of these plants, but I saw blooms this year and the flowers are intricate and beautiful.

My future hopes for this plant are to pull some babies from the leaves or divisions from around the plant and spread them around the native garden. I might pull one into the greenhouse as a stock plant to produce lots of babies in the future, as well.

I’ve been growing culinary sage for about fifteen years in the garden. It grows easily in my yard and doesn’t ask for anything–that’s why it has lasted this long. Several years ago, I took a bunch of cuttings when I pruned the original mother plant and I later planted the cuttings in another garden.

The plant has attractive leaves with a greyish bloom and nice texture. They set some blue-purple flowers in the summer. Of course, the fact that we can pick our own sage leaves and add them to any recipe comes in very handy. We use them a lot over Thanksgiving!

Future plans for these plants are to keep them trimmed and enjoy their nice contrasts and distinctive flavor.