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.

Colette has been with me for many years, first along the fence to the west of the orchard garden, and now in the garden in front of the greenhouse. This rose is supposed to be a big shrub or climber, but mine has stayed a bit anemic, topping out at maybe four feet and only throwing out a few flowers in June or July. The foliage doesn’t stay clean, but the flowers are a wonderful old-fashioned blend of form and fragrance.

My future plans for this plant are to feed it well and try to get some stronger branches on it and ultimately many more blooms.

This may be the oldest rose in my garden. If I recall correctly, I moved it from our rental house in 1995 when we moved to this house. It has very little disease resistance and gets black spot terribly every year and loses most of its leaves. Somehow, though, it throws off a few brilliant red flowers every year. They are such a sumptuous color and fine shape that I’ve kept the rose around despite its shortcomings.

Europeana is planted under the giant climbers Alister Stella Gray and Dr. Huey next to the Jeff Tangen arbor. It isn’t an ideal position except that I get an excellent view of the flowers when I walk through the arbor.

My future plans are to feed the plant more attentively and keep the bigger roses at bay so it has room to grow.

Leon purchased this hybrid tea rose as a patio plant about four years ago. It was a gorgeous thing when it got to our house–lush deep green foliage and eventually got amazing, flaming-red flowers. That beauty didn’t last long, sadly, as we couldn’t keep the pot moist enough and the leaves dropped and the flowers disappeared. In the following spring, I planted the rose into the garden in front of the greenhouse, not sure if it would survive. But later that first year, it had a few flowers, and since then it has grown bigger and better every year.

This year, this rose became a conversation point with the neighbors on whose property line it resides. It had a HUGE cluster of laser-bright flowers that likely was visible from the space station. The neighbors struggle to appreciate the messy chaos of my gardens, but this rose–they could appreciate this rose!

The shrub had another flush of blooms in August, not as showy as the first giant flush.

My future plans for this plant are to keep it trimmed, fed, and watered to hopefully get even more big heads of flowers next year.

I’ve had this rose for quite a few years–at least twenty. I had the unimproved Bonica before this and it had lovely flowers but no disease resistance. The improved version blooms nicely and has better disease resistance but lacks any fragrance at all. How do you breed and sell a non-fragrant rose? And who would be dumb enough to buy one? Oh. Well, it IS pretty and in my defense, I think the tag said “light fragrance.”

This rose was moldering away on the fence in front of the woodland garden for years, but I moved it to the bed in front of the greenhouse, a much sunnier spot, about seven years ago. Since then, its depression has faded and some spectacular happy blooming has replaced it.

My future plans for this plant are to keep it pruned and well-fed so it will stay happily blooming every June.

I’m not positive of the identification of these bonsai starts I germinated about seven years ago. They seem less wishbone-branched than that species, but it is one of the typical types used for bonsai and I believe the seeds came to me under that name.

I have about five seedlings left of these shrubs. I don’t have them in bonsai pots yet, but they already have a tiny tree look to them, with their thick-ish trunks and cascading braches. The leaves color up beautifully in autumn and one of them had a flower for the first time this year, so there will be berries at some point.

My future plans for these plants are to get them into bonsai pots next year and work hard to train them into perfect little trees with tiny rose flowers and red-orange berries.

I don’t remember where my purple shamrock came from, but I know I’ve had it for a long time–maybe fifteen years or more. The foliage is amazing and the flowers are charming, plus it is a bulbous plant which makes it pretty forgiving of bad treatment. It will go dormant when unhappy and then spring up again better than ever when conditions improve. It also increases generously.

My future plans for this plant are to break off a few small divisions to have some extras to share next spring. I should put this plant in a better pot, as well, since it is in black plastic now.