Brother Tim, sister Cate, and I came across this interesting plant at the Washington Park Arboretum. Here is a photo of the “mother” plant.

Those berries have seeds that grow pretty easily. I’ve had several batches of seedlings. None of the ones that I transplanted into the garden have survived, but the couple that I still have in pots are doing well.

For 2020, I will pot these into bigger pots and move them to the patio. My goal is for them to become patio plants.

Columbines have always found a home in my garden. They are easy to start from seed and don’t ask for a lot once they get situated. I probably have thirty columbine plants in the garden right now, mostly in the memory garden, but also in the driveway bed and the Douglas fir bed.

My challenge with columbines has been that I grow mixes or choose varieties that end up not being my favorites. Breeders have focused more on flower power and unusual forms and less on gracefulness and the natural beauty of the plants.

I’ve notice what looks like a mosaic virus on the existing columbines in the memory garden. I plan to root those out after they bloom and destroy them. Over time, I hope to replace all the hybrids with native columbine, Aquilegia formosa. I’ve got a bunch of seeds planted already in pots and I’m hoping to have transplants ready to go out this autumn.

Brother Tim passed me the first Lewisia, which is also the one that is doing the best. And my second Lewisia was purchased from a local nursery. I grew them both in the greenhouse like houseplants for several years, but they only did moderately well with that treatment. Since they are hardy here, I decided that they might like the dry, sunny edge of the memory garden. So, out they went in the fall of 2018 and they are doing alright out there.

Because their new home is directly under the giant Douglas fir tree, they don’t get much rainfall. Even in the very wettest weather, almost no water gets through that massive fir canopy. This should keep the Lewisias from rotting in the winter.

The second Lewisia is yellow-orange. It is starting to bloom now, so I’ll add a few photos in the next few weeks.

My 2020 plans for these plants are to feed them a bit and keep an eye on them to see how they are doing. There are native Lewisias to Washington, but I don’t think any are actually native to Seattle–they are more mountain denizens. I’ve seen bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva) growing wild near our cabin in Tonasket.

Here are some native flowers that are relatively new additions to the memory garden, planted in the fall of 2018. They bloomed well for me in May of 2019 and are blooming again now, in May 2020. From grass-like foliage, they send graceful sprays of the bluest star flowers. I’ve only seen these growing wild once in my life, down in a vacant lot in Centralia with a lot of other native wildflowers that were unfamiliar to me. Below are pictures of those plants, with the larger photos from my own garden.

I’m still learning how to garden with these. I want the foliage and any seeds to ripen, so I don’t want to plant anything to smother them over the summer as I might with tulips or narcissus.

For 2020, my goal is to add a bunch more of these to the native plant garden that we just created. I also plan to feed the existing bulbs a few times to make sure they continue to grow and thrive.

I’ve always loved strawberries, but my attempts at growing the various hybrids have yielded nothing. Given that, I thought maybe species like these alpine strawberries might do better. About five years ago, I grew the red, white and yellow varieties from seed. It turns out they are really easy from seed and I had enough to plant all around the orchard bed. A few of them remain.

The red berries have a strong strawberry flavor, while the white ones have a subtle, almost pineapple taste.

I don’t have a lot of photos of these plants, but I’ll work to get more this year. It turns out Fragaria vesca is considered a native plant in Seattle, so I plan to grow more of them to spread around the native plant garden. They are 76 species of butterflies and moths that use Fragaria as a host plant!

Not well known in the US, these berries are grown more often in Europe and have been hybridized there. My plant is about seven years old from Raintree Nursery. Like the Goumi, it is a handsome shrub with simple, attractive foliage. The May flowers are attractive, if not showy, both to me and to pollinators. The berries ripen all at once, which is nice for harvesting, and up until last year, they didn’t seem to attract birds. Last year, I waited to harvest them a little too long and when I went out there one day every berry had vanished.

One advantage that Aronia has over Goumi is that the fall foliage is brilliant most years–reds and purples and oranges.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to cut away some of the natural layers at its base and plant them in other locations or pots to share.

This is an exotic member of a great plant family that grows tall like jewelweed and gets bulbs like a dahlia. I bought a little bulb of this plant about seven years ago from Strange Wonderful Things on eBay. It grew quickly the first couple of years and multiplied, and bloomed, but I find it tough to grow well–or maybe I just haven’t tried hard enough.

I get the sense that I’m growing these plants too warm in the summer and they get spider mites and dry out too much in-between waterings. For 2020, I’m going to try moving a few pots of these bulbs out to the back patio to see if they do better outside the greenhouse. I’m also going to plant some into the garden to see whether they winter over.

These plants did particularly well in 2020 on the back patio in partial shade. They were only in gallon-sized pots, but they bloomed much better than they ever have before.

The queen of my spring-flowring clematis vines, this was planted at the same time and on the same fence as C. alpina “Willy” and C. macropetala “Markham’s Pink”, but while those other vines are polite, elegant ladies, C. montana “Rubens” is more of a brassy dame. The vine is very vigorous and the flower show is extraordinary every year.

The only work to be done with this vine is to trim it back after flowering to keep it in bounds. I won’t fertilize it for fear it will knock the fence down!

Planted on the same fence at the same time as C. alpina “Willy,” this vine is very similar. It is possibly more vigorous and the flowers are a richer pinky-mauve. It puts on a pretty good show, especially wherever its vines find the sun.

There isn’t anything to be done with this vine except to enjoy it in 2020.

After we fenced off the back patio, I planted several vines, including this clematis, that I’ve been enjoying for over twenty years. The bloom time is short, but I really like their form.

The above pictures were taken this week.

The vine flowers mostly at the very top where it gets more light. I’m sure the neighbors on that side are enjoying it. Leon hacked it back good last summer, but it still came back in time to bloom well this spring. For 2020, I will fertilize it with Jobe’s spikes tucked at its base, trim it as needed, and watch it fill in more and more for an even bigger show next year.