Purchased at a Puget Sound Gesneriad Society plant sale held at Sky nursery probably ten years ago, this plant is a late starter that really impresses when it reaches its peak. The leaves are richly quilted and deeply colored, while the flowers are graceful, pastel goblets with lovely details in the throats.

With my lazy label habits, I lost the tag for this plant almost the same day I bought it. I always thought it was a Chirita, but I found S. eumorpha online and that seems an exact match.

The plant grows from tubers and I haven’t done well by it, but it has managed to grow well every year until 2020. This year, no leaves were showing as of a month ago. When repotting all the other plants, I turned this treasure out of its pot and found most of the tuber had rotted over winter, but there was one solid bit. I potted that up and moved it to a top-shelf spot in the greenhouse and finally, just today, I noticed it leafing out.

What a beautiful plant, right?

My 2020 plans for this plant are to nurture the surviving division to get it to bloom and also take a leaf cutting or two to see if I can expand my collection a bit with some insurance plants.

Another Raintree Nursery purchase made close to a decade ago, this is another favorite berry that ripens in June/July, this is a variety of Rubus idaeus.

This berry’s canes are stiffer than the blackberry and tayberry canes and have a bluish white bloom that makes them easy to spot. The fruit appear in groups of about 7 or 9. A middle berry will ripen first, then the others will catch up over time. I like them so much straight from the cane that I’ve never made any baked goods or preserves with them.

My Jewel plant has weakened a bit over time, though it looks like it will have quite a few berries this year. My 2020 plans are to slip some fertilizer around it and manage the new canes carefully by pruning to maximize their 2021 output.

Unlike the cultivated blackberry clones planted at the same time, this wonderful berry from Raintree Nursery has been a great provider of delicious June/July berries. It is a cross between  a blackberry and raspberry (Rubus fruticosus x R. idaeus) and it is early and prolific for me most years. The canes are long and wiry with myriad small thorns along their length.

Tayberries have a mild flavor all their own, not particularly raspberry like or blackberry like.

My 2020 plan for these plants is to pot up some of the extra canes for plant sales or give-aways. Also, I will push some tip cuttings in late summer into pots to get them started easily for next year.

Started from seed purchased on eBay about ten years ago, I’m not sure these can be called “Loch Ness.” It is probably more likely to call the seedlings of Loch Ness. Like Chester, this is a thornless clone, and like Chester, I have had almost no luck getting decent berries from this plant. My brother has another of the seedlings growing at the P-Patch he manages in West Seattle, and that one gets berries every year when he can fend the weeders off who see any blackberry as a weed.

As I work to clear away the massive camellia and other plants in this area of the orchard garden, I’m hoping I’ll be able to free up some space for this plant to provide some tasty berries.

Despite the berry challenges, the flowers of this plant are some of the most beautiful in the garden.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to carve some space for it, feed it, and see if I can get it to produce some respectable berries next year.

The leaves are oddly curled on my seedling–not sure why, but you can see it in the photo above.

This rambling berry is from Raintree Nursery, purchased probably ten years ago. It hasn’t produced well for me, mostly because it lives on the northern-most berry trellis in the orchard bed and has been overgrown by a muscular camellia and shaded out by the berries in front of it. This year, however, because of the plant’s typical lengthy canes, I might have found a solution. I took a twelve-foot cane and laid it on top of the three berry trellises. The cane gets pretty much full sun up there and has set a lot of berries. I’m excited to see how they turn out.

For 2020, I am nurturing several other long canes to bend over the trellis tops again next year. Also, I’m going to cover a couple of bunches of berries with nylon bags to see if they ripen better and stay bug-free that way. I can’t wait to taste them!

The driveway bed features both the purple species and the pink Canon Went clone of this fun plant. The originals came in a pot that sister Cate shared and these generous spreaders have made themselves at home in the border and in pots ever since. Bees love these flowers, which is fun to watch.

Possibly because of the late spring, a few of these plants have really grown tall this year–approaching six feet! They usually top out at half that.

For 2020, I’ll work to get more and better photos of these plants.

This rambler was started from a seed borrowed from the Arboretum about 15 or so years ago. It has turned into a maleficent marauder. It has good qualities, but I need to root it out now that I see what it can do. It has clean blue-green foliage, wicked thorns, and lovely, fragrant single light pink wild-rose flowers. Best of all (and worst of all) it sets myriad bright red oval hips that are extremely festive in the fall and winter. The hips are bursting with viable seeds and they have spread around my yard–several along the driveway bed and a large one at the corner of the orchard bed near the neighbor’s yard. That one is over ten feet tall and smothering other plants and blooming madly right now! So, it has to go soon.

Here are some photos of the plants, flowers and hips through the years.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to conquer it completely and replace it with native plants with less territorial ambition.

This rose was a mystery until just last week. We have a rose rambling alongside and inside our “Alistair Stella Gray” rose that I knew I didn’t plant. It had to be the rootstock of another rose. Last week, I looked it up and found that most roses are grafted onto the strong growing Dr. Huey.

Dr. Huey may not be the best rose ever developed, but he has his merits. And this time of year, we see him all over Seattle! He is by far the most common rose around, having outlasted all of his fancier grafted tops.

This rose doesn’t have clean foliage, but the flowers have a classic charm and and a wonderfully intense red color that contrast well with the apricot-white of its more robust rambling neighbor.

In 2020, I’ll sneak in and put a fertilizer spike near this plant’s roots and prune it back a bit after flowering.

The first time I grew yarrow from seed was several decades ago when the “Summer Pastels” strain was released. I grew a bunch of them and planted them around the yard and they lasted a year or two and looked pretty good. Eventually, they died off. When I was choosing easy-from-seed perennials for the memory garden, I remembered yarrow and ordered more seeds.

Achillea millefolium is a native plant. This color strain likely isn’t purely native, but I’m hoping it gives some value to the native fauna. I also have started a few dozen plants of the straight species to plant around the garden–they are tiny seedlings right now, but will be ready to plant out by autumn.

For 2020, my plans are to spread yarrows far and wide and hope they attract lots of native pollinators.

Another fun plant from brother Tim, this plant came into my life a long time ago–at least a dozen years. It survives by seeding itself around into pots, sometimes welcomed and sometimes not. It has pretty leaves with maroon chevrons and round pink flowers that arrive over a long season. It is a trailing plant–I’m not sure exactly how long it might get since I cut if off before it really takes over.

The flowers appear to be a pollinator favorite. While working in the greenhouse today, I noticed a native orange-rumped bumble bee repeatedly visiting these plants on the greenhouse shelf.

For 2020, I’ll get some better photos of the plant itself and just enjoy the surprise nature of this plant’s appearance all around the greenhouse.