Our Seattle native bleeding heart is a graceful, showy spring bloomer. I added a three of these plants to my new native garden back in April 2020. They bloomed and grew well through their season, with their ferny blue-green leaves and dainty pink sprays of flowers.

My future plans for these plants is to keep them growing strongly and take divisions regularly to add to the garden and give to neighbors and friends.

By all accounts, I am a major disappointment as a vegetable grower. The one plant that gives me a bit of veggie confidence is the simple pea. I add sugar or snap peas to the garden every year and every year they grow and produce loads of peas. Then, almost nothing else that I plant grows much or produces any food. But at least the peas grew.

It should be noted, however, that we don’t eat many of the peas ourselves. Over the last fourteen years we’ve had a pea-obsessed llasa apso dog named Mona Lisa. Every weekday in the summer, as I’m coming home from work, I grab a few ripe peas off the vines and when I get in the door I pass them to Mona and Bodhi who devour them with relish.

I’ll keep growing peas every year so I have something successful in the veggie garden. There are new types coming along every year. I grew a short one last year and they were ridiculous–about six inches tall with only a few peas on each plant. It would have been easy to miss them altogether!

About fifteen years ago, when we added the Douglas fir bed to our yard, I planted two Aruncus dioicus plants at the base of the big Douglas fir that forms the center of the bed. I wasn’t super hopeful that these plants would survive the drive shade and competition in that position, but they surprised me by surviving and thriving for a long time.

Goats Beard, as the plants are called, are actually native to Seattle and probably grow in situations like this all the time! Both plants grew and bloomed for a few years, then just one held on for another long time. The plant grows like a giant Astilbe, getting five or more feet tall and topping out in summer with big white sprays of fluffy flowers. The foliage is very attractive, too, like an Astilbe crossed with horse chestnut.

This plant may have died out finally. The aucuba has taken up a lot more room and I haven’t seen any leaves or flowers for a few years. Since I am extremely excited about native plants, this plant is at the top of the list to bring back into the native plant garden in 2021.

How have I waited so long to give tribute to Brazen Hussy? I bought this plant at least twenty years ago when we were still adding things to our woodland garden. The name was irresistible to me. Later, I found out the plant was introduced by my favority gardening writer, Christopher Lloyd. It is a dark-leaved buttercup with attractive early spring flowers. It could be a maleficent marauder in the right conditions. For us, it spread a bit the first few years and then slowed down. It is possible it has fully died out at this time. For us, it was also a spring ephemeral–coming up in late winter, blooming, and then disappearing by summer.

Future plans for this plant will be to carry out an “Extinct or Alive” search for it in the spring. If, indeed, it is extinct, I will look into purchasing another one–I like where the plant came from almost as much as the plant itself!

If I remember right, I bought this plant at the Flower & Garden Show here in Seattle one year in February. It was a small plant in a small pot, but it wasn’t long before it started putting on a BIG show. The plant had pretty light pink flowers and it had a lot of them, covering itself in spring.

Sadly, one spring, the R. baurii pot never leafed out. Closer inspection of the pot gave me no clues–there was simply nothing left! It could have rotted away in the cold wet greenhouse or possibly slugs got to it. I really miss it! This might be a plant that I add back to the shelves in 2021.

I ordered a Griffinia from Strange Wonderful Things on eBay and received a healthy young start about eight years ago. I nurtured the bulb for a year and it bloomed! It had lovely, light lavender-blue blooms shaped like small, skinny hippeastrum flowers. Really magical.

Sadly, after it wintered over a third time, the plant never leafed out. Close inspection of the pot showed that likely baby slugs had found their way to the plant and eaten the entire bulb! I was heartbroken. I’m still heartbroken. So, I haven’t replaced this plant yet…but 2021 may be the year that I do, as it is lovely and well worth the investment of care and space.

Calendula, or pot marigold, is a perky, very hardy plant usually grown as an annual, but wintering over here in zone 8b. The plants that I have started from a free pack that was sent with some mail ordered seeds about ten years ago. I planted them around the raised vegetable beds to the south of the greenhouse and they’ve been with me ever since through volunteer seedlings.

These might be the easiest plants of all to grow from seed, and they pack a lot of flower punch over the course of the warm months and the not-so-warm months of November and December.

You don’t really choose your future with calendula plants–they are just always there once you’ve planted them. I cultivated one of the raised veggie beds this autumn and now there are dozens of calendula seedlings braving the cold soil there and growing on the warm days. I will keep them around just for the cheery blooms and the confidence they instill–when all my vegetable plantings fail, at least there are nice-looking pot marigolds around to make me feel like my efforts weren’t all in vain.

About five years ago, I ordered a mix of Verbascum seed from Chilterns in England. Many of them germinated and I planted them out around the orchard garden. Several of the cultivars in the mix were impressively showy, with tall multi-pronged spikes of pleasant soft yellow flowers.

Mulleins have been in my life since I was pretty young–the invasive V. thapsus grows in any bare spot in a field or dirt road, including up at our cabin near Tonasket–it is everywhere there along the roads. Once in a while I will see a moth mullein, V. blattaria, which is also naturalized here. It is a more refined plant with prettier flowers. Many years ago I grew a hybrid mix of V. phoeniceum. The flowers of this strain come in some fantastic colors, while the leaves are not fuzzy or particularly handsome. I got a few of them to grow, but they died out in my borders after the first year–they don’t seem to be perennial for me.

Volunteer mullein seedlings still appear around the garden. My future plans for them are to transplant them to the best places to show off their best attributes, which can be their big, fuzzy leaves, or their candlabras of bright yellow blooms.

Through the years, I’ve grown many different kinds of narcissus–everything from the traditional daffodils to small miniature hybrids. The only bulbs that have perennialized for me are February Gold and one of the poeticus hybrids.

I’m not a huge fan of bright yellow in the spring so I tend to buy narcissus bulbs of varieties that are otherly-colored in white, orange, or pink. Baby slugs and snails often find the flowers and eat just enough of the petals to spoil them–and it doesn’t seem to matter how tall the flower stocks are–the slugs will reach them.

My future plans for narcissus are to look to add a few more clumps of the poeticus types around the garden–their substance and fragrance are always welcome.

Père David’s maple is one of the snake bark maples that our local arboretum grows and, purely coincidentally and certainly not due to seed thievery, it has found its way into my tonsai shelves as seedlings. I believe brother Tim was the first in our to grow this species from seed, as he grew one at his previous home in Shoreline.

My seedlings are probably at least seven years old. I planted them together in a large-ish pot with the idea of planting them as a forest grove someday when I get serious about my tonsai. The trees feature interesting bark and beautiful autumn foliage.

Before spring arrives, I plan to repot this grouping, prune their roots and add new, fertile soil. I’ll take the time to do some branch pruning, as well, to start shaping these plants in a better forest formation.