Gasterias are the best low-maintenance succulents for my greenhouse–they don’t seem to mind the cold and they are happy enough with the mediocre sunlight, even in summer. This one grows well, if slowly, and has produced a couple of offsets over the years.

My future plans for this plant are to make sure that the soil gets replaced next spring and try not to overwater it.

Our native serviceberry didn’t find its way into our yard until April of 2020 when I planted one in my native plant garden. Surprisingly, the small shrub I planted, about three feet tall, bloomed, and set berries in its first year! This is considered an excellent plant for wildlife with its early flowers and nutritious berries. Many people eat the berries before the animals get to them, but I’m going to try to leave the berries for nature except for a few that I grab to start new plants from seed.

Future plans for this plant are to prune it up into a small tree and to keep it watered and fed the first year or two to make sure it gets well established.

When I germinated a pack of mixed Lathyrus species seeds about five years ago, a couple of the resulting plants were vines. I believe one is L. latifolius and I’m not sure of the other species. One of these grows up from the same spot as the seedling grape vine in the orchard garden, while the other one is planted at the base of the goumi berry shrub. They both grow vigorously and bloom prolifically without appearing to do any harm. One reason I planted them is to fix nitrogen in the soil for their companion plants to take advantage of…it seems to be working, since the grape vine and goumi berry are both growing really well.

I don’t have any major future plans for these plants. I just plant to keep them in bounds and enjoy their flowers. I’ll also watch for volunteers, since both set seed heavily every year and I want to be sure I’m not introducing another invasive plant to the neighborhood. So far, I haven’t seen one seedling.

I vaguely remember borrowing a seed pod off the neighbor’s trumpet vine in the fall of 2018, and last year I had a bunch of Campsis seedlings vigorously growing and starting to vine.

This second year, many of them continued to grow and contemplate vining. I didn’t give them anything to climb up yet–maybe next year.

What I like about these plants is that the foliage has interest in spring with reddish new growth, and interesting fall color, as well.

I may have the identify of these incorrect–the leaves don’t look exactly like the Campsis down the street. My future plans are to keep them growing in pots and tonsai a few of them in the coming years.

The last of my sedum entries, this is a daintier stonecrop with a beauty all its own. It has a more lacy look, but it is vigorous for its size and given a little help from the lazy gardener, it should beautifully cover some ground.

Propagating this stonecrop seems even easier than the others. I’ve knocked bits off into pots accidentally and every one of them became a little tree-like start. I’ll sprinkle a few more around the memory garden where space allows.

This blue sedum came with the cuttings I ordered for the memory garden three years ago. This is a brilliant looking plant, but it hasn’t fulfilled its potential in that garden, as grass and other weeds tend to get in and around it and so it isn’t the blue carpet it could be, but rather a welcome mat for all things invasive. Still, with more attention from the gardener, I believe it will shine next year.

Like the other sedums, I plan to propagate extras of this blue stonecrop and spread them around in bright spots throughout the memory garden.

Another sedum that came with the eBay cuttings purchased three years ago. This plant has the unfortunate common name of “stringy stonecrop.” I guess each branch might appear stringy, but the overall effect of a happy clump of these succulents is a lush, green carpet. It lights up in high summer with yellow flowers.

Futer plans for this stonecrop are to get some cuttings and spread it around the memory garden so I have a complete succulent tapestry in all the open, sunny spaces.

Knowing how challenging it would be for any plant to succeed in the hell strip that I turned into a memory garden three years ago, I ordered some sedum cuttings from an eBay grower and received starts of about five different kinds. I potted them and grew them on to healthy transplant size, then plugged them into the bone-dry, sunny, south-facing edge of the memory garden. They’ve done pretty well, especially this cultivar.

Future plans will be to root more cuttings of this clone and spread it into any blank spaces of the memory garden.

I went through a phase about seven years ago where I ordered a bunch of seeds from South Africa. Aloinopsis seeds were among those and I grew myself one strong seedling.

This is a fun plant that has a caudex, or big, woody stem that makes it look treelike when it really just wants to be a short ground cover. My plant had a flower bud once, but I never saw it bloom–I had to leave town and missed it! But it should bloom again someday with large, interesting, daisy-like flowers.

The leaves are interesting, too–really solid and succulent. And the colors on the plant run from green through red.

I moved this plant to a trough garden in 2020 and my hope is to grow it a little drier and happier and maybe encourage a bunch of flowers when I am in town.

Morning glory flowers have always impressed me–they can be really large and showy. I’ve grown different cultivars over the years, including Heavenly Blue, Flying Saucer and Grandpa Ott. My deepest memory of morning glory vines, though, isn’t from plants that I grew, but from a late summer drive in the Sandpoint neighborhood of Seattle where I spied a house with an entire high wall covered in Heavenly Blue morning glories, covered in thousands of flowers. It was phenomenal!

Most recently, brother Tim gave me morning glory starts to grow up a sculpture in the driveway bed. It was a fun experiment and reminded me of how much I really love morning glories.

My future plans for morning glories are to grow them again up this same sculpture, but I’ll give the vines a bigger pot to grow in and start them really early in the greenhouse so they can reach the very top of the ten-foot plant form.