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.

So many roses smell wonderful, but this climber tops them all in my estimation. I got a start of this plant at the Arboretum gift shop fifteen or so years ago and boy, did it ever grow! It has been blessing us with its floral show and fragrance every May/June and then a sporadic later show, as well.

The plant needs a hard chop in early spring to keep it in line. I neglected to do that this year. The flowers were amazing, but the canes are overtaking one of the dwarf cherries and heading over the roof!

I pruned the rose a bit today and will whack it back good next weekend to try to get it to resprout and rebloom later in the summer.

Purchased for the memory garden and planted out in 2018, these hardy geraniums, which I can’t tell apart, are a favorite. They both generously produce lavender-blue flowers with a white eye in May/June/July and probably will do so again in the fall if I cut them back at just the right time.

This year, I was worried that the plants weren’t going to do much. The cool, wet spring seemed to stall out their growth, but they are growing wonderfully now and blooming well.

My 2020 plans for these plants is to trim them down in late July to see if they will grow back and bloom again. I’ll feed them at that time, too. And work to get some better photos of them.

This tree was a seedling growing outside a fence in Broadview. Brother Tim and I discovered them on an adventure somewhere. It was only a few inches tall at that time, almost twenty years ago. I grew the plant in a pot for a few years and then decided it would be the perfect tree to plant near our koi pond in the woodland garden.

The tree grew quickly and gracefully and is beautiful next to the pond. I read somewhere, about ten years ago, that Styrax can be poisonous to fish! We’ve had no problems with the koi, but we cover the pond in the fall to keep leaves out and net all the flowers out that have dropped off the tree in June.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to keep it trimmed, if needed, and enjoy the dappled shade it provides to the koi pond.

I don’t remember where my first Queen’s Tears plant came from originally. I would guess I’ve had it for about seven or eight years. I’ve divided it into three pots and pretty much neglect them all and these sturdy plants don’t care. They keep growing and blooming every spring.

These plants aren’t particularly attractive and the flowers are more interesting than they are showy or beautiful, but their simplicity earns them a place in the greenhouse. The only other bromeliads I have are the air plants (mostly tillandsias) that grow on a branch in the greenhouse.

You can see my 2020 plans for these plants are a bit ruthless. I cut two of the pots almost completely down to the ground, as they looked pretty rough. My hope is that they’ll pop back up all fresh and green and I’ll do a better job of moving them out in the spring for their flower “show.”

I grew several of these semi-tropical shrubs from seed about ten years ago. I kept them in large pots, but they never bloomed. As a last resort, I planted the last survivor out in the open border along the driveway. The plant surprised me with its hardiness. It has died back to the roots every year, then resprouted and grown to five or six feet by late summer. But still, no flowers!

We had some significantly cold weather this past winter, but not enough to cut the Iochroma down. It stayed alive and fortunately I didn’t cut it back like I usually do! It leafed out all the way to the top and sprouted buds and now flowers!

The flowers are a bit bigger than I imagined and a lovely shade blue-lavender.

My 2020 plans for this plant will be to get a few cuttings in July to see if I can get a few for sales and maybe one for the memory garden. I’ll also make sure to get an organic fertilizer spike under it to help feed its additional growth this year.

This plant is known as the Cheddar pink, presumably because Cheddar, UK is part of its native haunts. I grew my lone plant from seed over ten years ago and it never fails to perform in June with good-sized, spicy-scented flowers. The plant was growing in a brick wall that surrounded the Douglas fir bed, but we removed the wall this year to do work on the native plant garden. The Cheddar pink appears nonplussed.

I don’t do anything to support this plant. In 2020, I will try to get some cuttings in July so I can plant one of these in the memory garden and give some away for sales or neighbors.