Here it is–my last Plant-A-Day entry! And who gets the last highlight? Elephant garlic! A friend of ours gave us starts of these plants five years ago and they’ve grown well in the raised veggie garden full of other, smaller garlic plants. What hasn’t happened, though, is for me to harvest them. They just don’t seem big enough yet to yank them out and eat them!

Elephant garlic is said to be milder than other garlic types and more digestible for those sensitive to garlic. How awful to not be able to digest garlic! But at least this allium is one way to get the flavor in your foods without making you sick.

Below you can see these plants bravely putting forth new growth at the end of December, 2020.

My future plans for these bulbs is to nurture them a bit and divide them so I won’t feel so frightened of harvesting them next year!

I can’t forget to give some space to the humble dandelion in my 2020 count. Dandelions were rampant in our lawn and garden when we moved to this house in 1995. I loved our neighbor, Phyllis, who had a wonderful perspective. Her lawn was more yellow than green in the spring with dandelion flowers and she loved it. She said she didn’t think of them as weeds, she just thought they had pretty flowers.

We tried to eliminate them from the lawn, at least, because it felt like any of these plants that went to seed would result in a thousand more non-grass plants in the lawn. Before I was more aware of the dangers of lawn products to wildlife and watersheds, we tried weed and feed products. This backfired because there were so many dandelions that when they died, they left big open spots were new dandelions could germinate!

We’re at a point where I can manually weed out any dandelions from the lawn. But they still pop up in the flower beds and get missed when I’m weeding. Inevitably, the cheery yellow flowers raise their perky faces and laugh at how seriously we take it all. I found this one today in the memory garden.

My future plans for dandelions are to keep chasing them down and removing them while knowing full-well they will always be with me. I might try eating some, too, now that our lawn is organic.

I was actually pruning this plant yesterday, which reminded me to count it as a plant-a-day. I’ve had this plant for over twenty-five years. We moved it to this house from the rental house we had before. It wants to be a monster of a shrub, with even more vigor than its B. davidii cousins. I like the flowers of this one because they are so different–a warm gold shade and in unusual ball-shaped clusters.

Despite being called a butterfly bush, this particular type seems less attractive to pollinators of any kind. It also doesn’t seem to reseed at all, which is great because B. davidii is invasive here in Seattle.

This shrub is growing along the northern fence in the orchard bed. I cut it back to four feet yesterday and will hope for some more compact growth and lots of flowers in 2021.

While native to Washington, I’ve come to realize this plant is only native to the east-side of the state. But I started several from seed this year for the native garden. Oops. It will be a bit of a miracle if they ever get to blooming size, anyway. They seem to be slow to develop.

This plant family has some interesting looking flowers, though most of the plants themselves are a bit coarse. A. speciosa is no exception. I guess that’s why they are called milkweeds. But wherever they are native, they are definitely not unwanted weeds to the many insects and animals that rely on them.

I’ve already set the seedlings out into the meadow portion of my garden. Now, it’s just a waiting game to see if they leaf back out, then put some growth on to get to blooming size in the next couple of years.

In the same family as blue-eyed grass, a native wildflower that I see often up near our cabin, this plant came to me in a pack of mixed bulbous plant seeds. Germinating and growing quickly, I wasn’t sure what this plant was. Then, it got a few flowers that first year and I was clued in. And my brother recognized it from perennials growing in a public food garden he helps manage in West Seattle.

This plant has really strong, sword-like leaves and spikes of light yellow flowers that last for a month or so. Mine never filled out the way I’ve seen they can and has since either died back or gone dormant for an extra year.

I’m hoping this plant is still out in the garden in front of the greenhouse. My future plans will be to feed it and to get seeds from it to start some more plants. They are pretty fun and different.

Sister Cate passed me this plant at least twenty years ago. It is one of those plants that volunteers at its own discretion, not plentifully every year. Also, it seems like the seeds lie in wait for a few years and then resurface in the border, or in a crack in the driveway–you just never know.

Unfortunately, malvas get rust here in Seattle in the worst way. If these plants get a strong start in their first year, they can put on a magical (or mystical) show.

I don’t have any plans for Mystic Merlin because there aren’t any in the garden this year that I know of; but they will magically rise again.

When I was planning the memory garden, I knew that I’d need low-growing cushions for the south side of the bed. I tried many different kinds of seeds. Unfortunately, only one of the Arabis plants made it to adulthood. Fortunately, though, it is a really lovely plant.

This plant blooms in March/April and smothers itself in pristine white flowers. It doesn’t get above an inch-and-a-half tall, so it is perfect at the front of the border.

My future plans for this plant are to propagate it from spring cuttings and spread a few more along the south edge of the memory garden.

I ordered “potatoes” to start potato vines about seven years ago from eBay. The first year, they hardly grew and the resulting vines were really attractive and tame. However, it is easy to see the marauding nature of these vines and their ease of self propagation, to I didn’t plant any in the garden. They found homes in pots on the patio with taller plants they can climb on.

They’ve grown larger and even had bulbs in the leaf axils in the subsequent years. The leaves are wonderful–the vein pattern and texture are fantastic.

The leaves in the photo belong to D. bulbifera, but the flowers belong to Sinningia tubiflora.

My future plans for these plants are to feed them a little better with Jobe’s organic plant spikes and try to get more robust growth on them.

My wish to have Anemone species that thrive in my yard led me to start the native Anemone multifida from seed this year. I ended up with two small plants from the seeds that I started in spring 2020. They are attractive seedlings that I planted out in the native garden in the autumn.

My future plans for these plants are to baby them a bit in the first year to see if I can get them established and ready to bloom in 2022. I might start more from seed in 2021, too, because they germinated pretty easily.

I ordered a bag of A. blanda bulbs in one of the white forms for the Douglas fir bed about five years ago. For about three years, they grew and bloomed beautifully every March. They appear to have died out since then.

The Anemone family of plants has so many attractive members. I’m trying to find just the right ones that will survive in our garden. The leaves are interesting shapes, often, and the flowers have a delicate grace and some suble coloring that seems especially appropriate for early spring.

I don’t have any plans for these plants currently since they appear to have died off. I will keep trying new family members to see if I can get some to thrive and really put on a show.