Yes, it is early to be posting this, but I am taking the giant leap that the same plants I found blooming in the garden today will still be blooming four days from now.

It is always fun to scan the garden for late flowers around Thanksgiving, and then again on Christmas day.

Here’s what I found today…not all of them are flowers, but worth showing, anyway:

Any native plant garden that I maintain needs to have berries. I pretty much love all berries and I assume that wildlife loves them all, too. So, I added thimbleberries when I started the native plant garden this year. There are two pots of them and they were pretty wimpy to start with, but they have grown strong throughout their season and still have leaves on them now.

I already love the fact that creatures are eating away at the leaves of these plants–they are already part of the food web. I just hope they have enough energy leftover to keep growing and get to flowering size in the next year or two.

My future plans for these berries are to keep them watered and fed until they are fully established. Then, I hope to be able to peel off divisions frequently to keep them contained and share them with neighbors.

I’m not positive of the identity of this laceleaf maple in the woodland garden, but it looks a lot like Pung Kil and, in November of 2020, it is putting on a brilliant show on its branches and on the ground.

Growing next to Bloodgood, the two complement each other while the leaf shape/texture and timing provide some distict contrasts.

There aren’t any future plans for this plant other than to keep it irrigated in hottest, driest summer. It doesn’t ask for anything else and it gives a lot with beautiful spring foliage, nice color and shape all year, and a brilliant autumn finale. The tree even looks amazing in the snow!

The common name of “creeping” buttercup doesn’t capture the voracious way this plant eats up territory. It should be renamed Smothercup. And if you ever make the naive mistake of thinking that the garden is asleep in the winter, this maleficent marauder will prove you very wrong. It uses the fall and winter to spread by stolons across large swaths of the garden so that when you step out for your early spring clean-up, you have yards of buttercup to eradicate.

I will say this positive thing about this invasive weed–digging out these plants provides so much pleasure. No other weed gives me this much satisfaction. It has to do with the way the plant grows–there is a thick wad of white roots at each node or under each main plant, and prying them up and pulling them out, you know you actually have removed the weed–it isn’t like a taproot that breaks off and resprouts. Once they are gone, they are gone. But, for me, they are never quite gone.

My future plans for these plants are to do a better job of eradicating them early so I don’t have as much of a problem through the year. Specifically, they need to be dug out from the garden in front of the greenhouse and the bed near the fence in the orchard garden. One of these wet but warm days I will rip the all out and feel very proud and satisfied.

This compact version of the golden striped bamboo has lived in our yard for over twenty years. The plant got moved to the Douglas fir bed right under the big tree and despite the dry shade there, it has survived. It never quite looks its bushy, vibrant best, probably due to the dryness.

My future plans for this plant are to get a few small divisions of it, as I think it would do well under the taller bamboos in the woodland garden.

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.