We’ve had the native maidenhair fern in our garden a few times. The first was about twenty years ago in the woodland garden near the pond, where one fern really took off and grew beautifully, but then faded away. This year, when I added my new native garden, I added A. pedatum.
These ferns are remarkable in their delicate, intricate beauty. Each frond is a miracle of design. And a well-growing plant is awe-inspiring. My new maidenhair isn’t well-growing yet, but it is on its way to that level.
My future plans for this plant are to keep up with watering it during dry spells in its second year and making sure it gets the right amount of shade. Beyond that, I want to grab some spores off of it and start them in a terrarium in the greenhouse next year.
Likely this plant was rescued from a workplace, but I don’t honestly remember—I know I’ve had it about five years. Known to be tough as nails, these plants are considered impossible to kill, but I’ve come close to doing just that. The plant was down to one living leaf this spring. I took leaf cuttings as an experiment, having seen someone on the web do this. The leaf cuttings have rooted and formed tubers, but they have not yet leafed out. I have them in the greenhouse now. The parent plant just got another healthy leaf.
These can be attractive plants when well-grown, but I find them a bit boring. I will likely get rid of them all except maybe one baby if the leaf cuttings ever leaf out. I’m not sure they will survive the cold temps in the greenhouse, but I’m hoping the scale that the mother plant has had off and on won’t survive the cold and that the plants will.
We have several varieties of Japanese maple, including the coral bark maple already highlighted, and this graceful form. Currently, in a pot on the patio, this plant lived in the woodland garden for a while, but we couldn’t find a suitable place for it. We eventually potted it up and it is growing just fine now, although it has grown from both above and below the graft.
A patio pot suits this plant because we can really see the delicacy of the leaves close up. This is especially valuable in the autumn when the leaves color up in glorious oranges and reds.
Future plans for this plant are to clip the growth from below the graft so the strength of the tree goes into the lacier leaved branches. We’ll keep it watered and fed and repot it as needed.
I ordered Biophytum seeds online after hearing about this plant on the On the Ledge podcast. They were listed as an interesting terrarium plant, so I thought I’d give them a try. Their common name is “little tree plant” because of the way their long leaves grow, giving even small plants a tree-like appearance. I grew three plants in a terrarium for about eight months–then, when I forgot to water, they died. Luckily, they had bloomed (very small, nondescript flowers) and set seed, so a seedling popped up in a nearby pot and has survived ever since.
The species name refers to the fact that the plant folds up like the sensitive plant. I only have photos of the plants folded up!
I am hoping to keep this last survivor alive through the winter in the window and get seeds off it that I can start or give away. They are cute to have around, even as a ground cover in pots with larger plants. However, I read online that they can become weedy in greenhouses, so I’ll keep an eye out for that–I have enough weeds in there!
More picturesque, if not as potentially tall, as Douglas fir, western red cedars are magnificent trees. They have been revered by native people for thousands of years, and now they are revered by me.
We don’t have room to have a full-grown western red cedar tree on our city lot–they can get 200 feet tall, with huge spread and massive, buttressed trunks. But the house across the street has a couple of trees that were left when the new houses were built about a dozen years ago. These trees drop seeds around and the seeds occassionally start in the ground or in pots here in our yard. I have been potting up the seedlings for several years, planning to bonsai some and possibly put others in larger pots on the patio.
They don’t seem to mind growing in pots, so long as they never really dry out–even when I let them get way to potbound, which happens surprisingly quickly.
My future plans are to prune the roots of these plants late next winter and trim them up a bit to prepare them for their futures as tonsais (my name for the half-assed bonsais I intend to produce).
I have bittersweet memories of this plant. About twenty years ago I harvested seed from the ground outside Amy Yee tennis center and started a few seedlings. They did well and I moved a group of them to a large bonsai pot where I grew them for about ten years. They grew as one plant that was very attractive, if not up to exacting bonsai standards. The plant even bloomed a few times and the flowers were surprisingly showy and sweetly fragrant. And it colored a purple maroon in the autumn before dropping its leaves.
But one year, the plant didn’t leaf out in spring. It was dead. I have no idea why. Sudden ash death syndrome. SADS.
Two years ago, I was at Amy Yee again and the same trees had shed seeds all over the sidewalk. How could I resist? Now I have about ten ash seedlings growing in small pots on the shelves outside the greenhouse.
These plants lend themselves to larger forms of bonsai since the leaves are rather large and coarse. I will keep them growing well and move some to training pots in the spring.
Most often called Japanese barberry, I can’t remember if the seeds for my plants came from the Washington Park Arboretum or, more likely, from some landscape I was wandering near or through. I am very drawn to barberry berries, as they are a brilliant reddish orange or red and they have a nice oval shape and are the perfect size for accidentally falling into pockets.
My seedlings are about three years old and they have been growing slowly. The leaves are a reddish-green most of the time, but now (November) is when they really make themselves known by coloring up in scarlet and orange tones.
My seedlings are destined for bonsai pots soon, as are most of my tree and shrub seedlings. I’ll prune them to maximize their leaves because come autumn, I’ll want them to light up the bonsai shelf with their true colors.
What an unusual and fun plant is duckweed. We found out from a friend that koi love to eat it, so we drove to local ponds and harvested some to feed them. They ate a LOT! We had to make a couple of trips a month in the warmest weather.
I was able to winter some duckweed over in the greenhouse last year in a dormant state and the plants leafed out in a bucket in the spring and then provided all the duckweed the koi could ever want through the summer. This plant is very prolific!
The lifecycle of this plant is fascinating. They have tiny flowers that humans rarely see, but that are visited by flies, mites, small spiders, and even bees. But they can also be pollinated just by bumping into each other on a windy day. Duckweed’s most common propagation technique is to form new chains of plants-and they are so prolific that scientists are find ways to use them to remediate polluted bodies of water and also to grow medicines, like synthetic insulin. And they can also produce “turions”–special buds that drop to the pond’s bottom, overwinter there, and then float back to the top and leaf out into duckweed plants.
Future plans for this plant are to move the full bucket of plantlets to the greenhouse and hope they winter over again so we have readily available fresh salads for the koi come late spring.
As I was wandering the autumn garden today, I realized we have quite a few Japanese maples, including this very red cultivar that is even more red this time of year.
We added this tree about 23 years ago when we added the woodland garden and it is getting tall–over twenty feet, and well-branched. It leafs out with a red tinge, turns a darkish red with just a hint of green in the summer, then flames brilliant scarlet as the leaves end their lives with a glorious flare.
My future plans for this tree are to enjoy its carefree beauty.
I realized that while this isn’t one species, these grasses take up a lot of space in the garden and deserve to be called out here. Since I am currently waging a war on lawns, it seems even more appropriate to call out these plants in a Plant-A-Day post.
Most of us find a healthy, clipped lawn to be attractive. Some of us also find a lawn essential to any home landscaping.
We inherited a mediocre lawn when we bought this house and my goal from day one was to eliminate it slowly to arrive at a zero-lawn landscape. First, we eliminated the lawn directly north of the house and added the woodland garden. Then, we added two raised vegetable beds on the south side of the yard, then two more. We added a sizeable raised bed around the Douglas fir tree. Then, I eliminated the lawn north of the driveway and added the orchard bed. I also have been widening the driveway bed on the south side of the driveway. And lastly, just this spring, we added the native plant garden, which covered up another huge chunk of the lawn.
Our lawn has suffered over the years from silly things, like the time Leon had to move a heavy sculpture and had to drive a forklift across the wet lawn. Early attempts at weed killing resulted in large bare patches that ultimately filled with more weeds. Fertilizing resulted in lush growth in the mowing season and more frequent mowing than usual.
The lessons I’ve learned from our lawn and my environmentally friendly gardening research is that lawns don’t need fertilizer–just leave the clippings on them. Removing weeds by hand is the best way to get ride of dandelions and others. It is fine to let the lawn turn brown in the summer–no need to irrigate a lawn in Seattle. All of our neighbors have brown lawns, too. Mowing is only needed from about the end of March to the middle of July in most years, with one last mowing in the fall–late October or early November.
My future plans for the lawn are to keep eating away at it every year until it is finally gone, replaced by more productive plantings that support local fauna and add more interest and beauty in all seasons.
