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.

I started these impressive perennials from seed over twenty years ago. They are growing on the street side of the orchard garden, seeding themselves around a bit every few years so that they haven’t died out altogether.

When growing happily, these plants can get six feet tall with dozens of pincushion-like (scabiosa-like, if you know what scabiosa flowers look like) flowers. The color is a soft cream and white. My own plants are too crowded to look their best.

Here is a Cephalaria survivor in November of 2020…notice that it is throwing up buds even at this late date.

Future plans for these plants are to move a division or two to the memory garden where they will do more than survive–and I expect their flowers will attract a lot of pollinators there in a sunnier spot.

Chickweed is a global plant that started in Eurasia and with human help has now conquered the world. It has also conquered my greenhouse and all my potted plants. I don’t particularly mind this weed except when it completely overwhelms more delicate potted treasures. It is easy to remove because all of its growth comes from single stem at ground level–I can just clip it off there with some fingernails and I’ve slowed down its takeover for another month or two.

Chickweed is edible and doesn’t taste bad–its pretty bland. I can eat it right out of my pots. However, it can be toxic if you eat too much and there isn’t a lot of guidance about what too much means.

I try hard to clip all the plants back in the greenhouse and pots before they go to seed to slow them down, but so far I haven’t gotten anywhere–they come up in spring and again in fall in virtually any open ground.

My future plans for these plants are to keep after them and admire their tenacity.

The western sword fern is to top fern of the Pacific Northwest. It may not be the most beautiful fern, but it is by far the most common and most noticed. We have had these ferns in the woodland garden and I moved one to the Douglas fir bed where it continues to thrive in the dry shade of a forest giant. Sporelings of these ferns pop up in pots, too, and so we have a few of them as patio plants.

Where happy, these ferns can create a dramatic, huge cicle of fronds. They are evergreen, but to keep them looking fresh most gardeners remove all the old fronds in late winter before the fiddleheads appear.

Indigenous people used this plant as a topical painkiller and they ate the rhizomes in tough times.

Note that this last photo is of a sword fern that we had in a hanging basket on the fence. It didn’t get watered enough and it turned brown. You can see that it isn’t dead, though, and next year it will leaft out per usual and look great again. These are tough plants!

My future plans for these are to mix some into the native plant garden and to keep some in pots on the back patio where they really thrive and keep things looking cool and easy.

The ribbon fern, or Cretan brake fern, features in my On the Ledge Sow-Along experiment related to Jane Perrone’s amazing podcast. In the late winter, she encourages her listeners to grow houseplants from seeds (or spores) as another way to appreciate houseplants and increase our collections.

I found these spores online and ordered them and followed the planting instructions without bothering to really sterilize anything–just starting mix in a plastic, lidded container and some water. And then wait. And wait. A green growth started on the soil after a few weeks, and then the prothallus followed and spread across the entire container. More recently, I believe that the sporophytes have developed. They are starting to look like tiny ferns. Dozens of tiny ferns. After about seven months, the tallest one is still only about an inch tall and doesn’t have any true, recognizable ribbon fern fronds yet.

I brought the container home from the office so I can watch the sporelings better. My plan is to pot up about 20 of them into separate little pots in the spring and move them to the greenhouse. I will give some away and keep a few for home and office.

I’m not 100% sure of the identify of this maidenhair fern, purchased as a houseplant about four years ago now. Maidnehair ferns are infamous as difficult houseplants and we’ve certainly killed our share of them. We’ve tried them in the kitchen and the bathroom and inevitably they shrivel up and die. This one did, as well, but I grabbed it before it was completely dead and moved it out to the greenhouse. I forgot about it for a few weeks and when I looked at it again, it was bushy and green again!

This plant doesn’t seem to mind the cool temperatures in the greenhouse in the winter. I moved it to a fish bowl that increases the humidity even more and it seems really happy in there. It doesn’t exactly fit inside anymore, but I’m not going to get too worried about aesthetics–just having the plant thriving is a thrill!

My future plans for this plant are to find a better terrarium to put it in–maybe a fish tank that I could populate with other humidity-loving, delicate plants.