Known as blue wild rye, this grass is native to Seattle. I started a bunch of seedlings this year (2020) to add to the native plant garden. Luckily, they germinated well and I have about thirty starts, some that have been planted out already and others that are waiting to go into the garden.
Native grasses are important food for native food webs, and I’m really hoping this grass attracts some woodland skipper butterflies to lay their eggs next year so I can have more of these skittish flyers in and around the garden.
I’m mixing some other prairie or meadow plants with the blue rye grass to hopefully create a space that butterflies and other pollinators love.
Purchased from eBay about ten years ago, I have a very cramped pot of this tuberous plant and also one smaller cutting that has survived. This plant is probably hardy outside here in Seattle, so I’m going to plant the cutting out in the memory garden to see how it does.
Sinningia is an attractive plant family, and this is no exception with its gray-green fuzzy leaves and fragrant tubular white flowers on tall stalks. They have a very faint scent of vanilla. The added bonus is that the flowers arrive really late in the season, September and beyond.
Future plans for this plant include a division and repot in the late winter to get at least six plants and a few small divisions coming along. And I could use a lot better photos, too, of all stages of this plant’s growth.
Henderson’s checker mallow is a native plant here in Seattle that I decided to grow from seed and add to my native plant garden. The seeds germinate well and I’ve gotten several plants to the adolescent stage, large enough to plant out in the open garden. The plants resemble more refined hollyhocks, smaller in all ways. I’ll expect some pink flowers on two- or three-foot stalks next summer.
My future plans will be to keep an eye on the garden plants and also to purchase more seed and get more checker mallows started to add to the garden and give away next year.
There are three different jungle cactus in my collection, two orchid cactus and a night-blooming cereus. One of the orchid cactus plants is an old friend, having come from brother Tim over twenty years ago. It cycles through good and bad years and blooms every now and then with huge, electric magenta flowers. The second orchid cactus came from a cutting that Leon’s cousin brought to the family reunion several years ago. I grew it on and it has gotten to blooming size–we’ll see if any buds appear in the spring.
The night-blooming cereus is a gift from our friend Staci Adman who has an old “mother” plant that blooms for her every year. These plants are famous, not just for their fantastic, intricate white flowers, but also for the fact that they open in a time window narrow enough to visibly see, so you can literally watch the plant bloom. This plant was given to me about five years ago and it has done terribly for me. One year, I put it outside for the summer and some bugs found it and stripped it to almost nothing. I thought it was a goner, but it has come back a bit and gotten a good fat stem on it this year.
The flowers of these plants are simply shocking. Six or more inches across and in the brightest of colors, they provide a stark contrast to the simple, sometimes homely form of the branches from which they spring.
Like the holiday cacti, my future plans for these plants are to study their care and then apply my learnings to hopefully get bigger, healthier, more floriferous plants.
I have six or seven of these plants, all from different places and none of them are as healthy as I’d like. Thus, I don’t get the flower show in autumn/winter that I would like to see. Still, the plants don’t ask for much and the flowers are extraordinary when they do appear.
Most of these plants have been orphaned and brought in by me. Several were from workplaces. The largest one is from neighbors who moved and dropped the plant off. The most recent two plants are cuttings from a sad plant my dying sister Nikki passed to me in the hopes I could revive it. The plant itself was beyond hope, but I was able to get two strong cuttings off of it and they are thriving.
My challenges with these plants include sunlight. I keep them in the greenhouse and I haven’t found the right level of light that they prefer in there, so they tend to be a light green and not the deep, rich, dark green I’ve seen in healthier specimens. Also, I can’t keep them in complete darkness at any given time since the greenhouse is exposed to any ambient light, including streetlights and neighbor’s porch lights. Lastly, I’m not sure I’ve gotten the potting medium exactly right. I try to mix orchid bark with potting soil, but that seems only partly successful.
My future plans for these plants are to study their care a lot more and to work to get them healthier and happier in the coming year.
Sweet alyssum has been a favorite of mine since childhood. It is super easy to grow and the fragrance really is sweet. Also, in Seattle, this plant survives the winter and actually looks even better as a groundcover or pot plant the second year.
I don’t grow this plant all that often, but it is a fun filler for patio pots and garden beds. I had a leftover alyssum in a pot that survived the winter and is now blooming like mad in the driveway bed.
I might try to take some cuttings early next spring to increase my stock and plant them around in pots and beds as needed next year.
One of Leon’s favorite flowers, I try to build dahlias into the landscape or patio pots every year. Lately, I’ve just had a few of the dwarfer anemone-flowered types in pots on the driveway and there is one waterlily-flowered survivor in the driveway bed.
My plans for dahlias in the future include adding a few new varieties next year to the various beds and pots. I’ll need to add some bigger pots, too, for them to really show their colors–the smaller pots don’t seem to work well.
This wonderful little tree came to me from my friend and co-worker Shannon. She picked it up on a trip to California early in 2020. I was skeptical that I could keep it alive, but so far it has done really well.
This, the largest of all trees, will not be the largest for me, not only because I won’t live long enough to see it, but because I’ll keep it in a pot to contain it.
My future plans for this tree are to coddle it and pot it into bigger pots as needed with the hope that the tree and I will live to see it surpass me in height.
My first and favorite perennial aster arrived unnamed from brother Tim from one of the gardens he was tending for an elderly woman. It has lavendar flowers in September/October and spreads generously. You don’t really remember it is there until the flowers start poking out among all the other plants.
The late timing of these perennial asters is a blessing in any garden or border. We have so few good flowers blooming in the autumn. I ended up adding a bunch of starts of various asters to the memory garden from a grower selling on eBay. I also ordered some hybrid asters from some mail-order categories. All of them are blooming now in October with very little else.
My future plans for these plants are to replace some of them with the native asters that will be a better match to local pollinators and plant eaters.
Red flowering currant shrubs have been on my wish list for a while, but it wasn’t until I started landscaping with native plants that I actually added some to the garden. I purchased two of them from Seattle Native Plants this spring and Mark, the owner, sent me two pots with two strong currant starts in each, so technically I had four of them. Since then, I took cuttings from them and added five more small ones in pots in the greenhouse.
The value these plants bring is not just ornamental but in their wildlife value. From realgardensgrownatives.com:
Wildlife value Pendulous flower clusters, which consist of numerous lightly fragrant, pink to reddish tubular flowers, bloom in profusion along this shrub’s many stems. They offer nectar and pollen at a time when early-emerging pollinators — such as queen bumble bees who must secure a nest and provide for offspring all by themselves — have little else to eat. The early blossoms are also attractive to birds, especially hummingbirds, but also bushtits, making this species a hub of wildlife activity for well over a month. Later on, when berries ripen as summer wanes, birds such as American robins and cedar waxwings feast (we can also eat them but they are rather tasteless). The small, lobed leaves may provide food for zephyr (Polygonia gracilis zephyrus), Ceanothus silkmoth (Hyalophora euryalus), and other butterfly and moth larvae, which in turn supply food for insectivorous birds.
My 2020 plans for these plants are to keep them watered a bit as they continue to become established and sneak more cuttings off of them as I can for sales and gifts. I’m not sure I’ll get flowers next spring, but I imagine I will in 2022 and for many years to come.
