I have a total of four Helleborus x hybridus plants in the garden currently–I will list them separately in my Plant-A-Day posts because I have great photos of each one and they all have a different history. The first plant, like so many of my favorites, was a gift from brother Tim not long after we moved into our house–so more than twenty years ago. The plant has white flowers with lots of crimson/purple speckles inside, but you have to get down to see them because they point downwards.

This plant is growing near a downspout next to the house in an out-of-the-way corner. It grows well there and blooms well every year, so I am hesitant to make a change. My 2020 plan for it will be to clip the surrounding plants to be sure it gets enough light and can be seen when in bloom.

Another amazing plant from brother Tim. This jungle cactus was a start from a mother plant he’d gotten from Ove and Helen Pearson from their nursery back in the 90s. I’ve had the start for at least 20 years.

This is another case of a plant that doesn’t get enough attention from me. In some early years, it seemed to do well and it would put forth three or more giant, magnificent, glowing magenta flowers. Lately, though, I’m lucky to get one flower from it. I always struggle with how to manage a growing epiphyllum–they ideally should live in a hanging basket or up on a shelf allowed to hang down. I’ve had a lot of damage from slugs and maybe some viral diseases impact this plant, too. The great news is that it grows easily from cuttings and I have the old stock plant and a new cutting started to start 2020 in a promising way

My 2020 plans for this plant include repotting it into solid pots and potting soil that is 1/3 soil, 1/3 moss, and 1/3 orchid bark and fertilizing it well to hopefully get a strong, good-looking plant and maybe a bunch of flowers next year.

Our friends Chrystal and Richard had a big shrub of this plant in a pot that they moved outside in the spring and back into the garage nearby in Shoreline in the fall/winter. They would cut the plant back and put the stems in water to root them. I took several of those branches off their hands and rooted them in soil and grew them on. That was probably at least 12 years ago. I took cuttings and had half a dozen Brugsmansias at one point. They take up a lot of room and need a lot of fertilizer, so I whittled my collection down to this one plant. Here are photos of it from over the years.

The plant itself isn’t much to write about–just one main trunk with only one medium-sized branch to one side.

This plant needs some attention in 2020. It needs to be repotted and root pruned in March and given some fresh, fertile soil. I’ll move it to the patio and hope for some stronger growth this year and many more flowers.

These interesting bulbs came from an eBay seller possibly twelve years ago. What has been interesting about them is that they don’t really thrive in the greenhouse, but they reproduce anyway through offsets. So, I’ve had up to a dozen pots of them in the past, but I am probably down to five pots now. Usually one or two of the bulbs seem to be doing well and getting several leaves and building up mass–teasing me into thinking that maybe someday there could be flowers. But in twelve years, no flowers have appeared. I’ve asked the Pacific Bulb Society members for suggestions, but their suggestions and the online resources haven’t solved anything for me.

My 2020 plans for these plants are to top-dress them with lots of fertilizer mixed in and to move them outside in the spring in bright light to hopefully ripen off the bulbs and get stronger, bloom-ready plants.

Here is another old friend. I started this plant from seed a LONG time ago…maybe 20 years. It started out slowly and I wasn’t sure it would be warm enough in the greenhouse over winter, just ticking over above freezing. But it was happy enough to grow and grow and finally to bloom a few years ago.

Were my plant parenting skills scrutinized more, this plant would surely have been removed from my care in the last couple of years. I tried to pot it on into a larger pot, but the way its roots and stems are angled makes it difficult to manage. My 2020 goals for the plant will be to situate it more appropriately and to feed and water it well to try to get it back to health and to bloom.

There are some plants that I don’t really remember buying, and these Hippeastrelia bulbs are examples. I suspect the three bulbs came from an eBay purchase that arrived from India, but I don’t really know. I would guess that I’ve had them at least ten years. They are an interesting species cross of Hippeastrum and Sprekelia.

It took a few years for these to become happy enough (or potbound enough) to flower, but now they do it regularly. I divided the bulbs up two years ago. In addition, because they are self-fertile, I’ve grown some seedlings, too. Without actually counting, I guess I have about seven pots of these hybrids currently.

What I love about them is the hybrid vigor and the spectacular flowers with their exotic shape. The way the flowers appear is wonderful, too, as very quickly the buds appear and open. For someone like me who might not look at them even every week, I can be pleasantly surprised when that first blaze of crimson appears.

My 2020 plans for these plants are to top-dress the mature bulbs and fertilize them consistently to get as many flowers as possible. For the seedlings, I intend to pot them up into 5″ pots and fertilize them well, also, to hopefully get flowers soon.

In the late fall of 2018, I visited Honolulu and visited Foster Botanical Garden for the first time. This is an amazing space close to downtown that was founded by an interesting plant fanatic, William Hillebrand, back in the 1850s. I read his story in a great book that my friend Dean purchased for me during the garden visit. It was fascinating to hear about how challenging it was to import plants at the time, and the obsession that many people had to try and have one or two of EVERYTHING from around the world. The plants came in by boat after months at sea and thousands of them were lost, but William stuck to it and introduced some beautiful specimens to this garden.

While we wandered the garden, some lonely seeds fell into my pockets and wouldn’t leave me be, so I brought them home. Among them were various palm nuts, and three of those have since sprouted, one in my office at work and two on my heat mat at home.

This palm is now about a year old and only has one long strappy leaf. My hope in 2020 is that I can keep it growing and get a second leaf!

Corydalis species have an interesting history with me. It seems like the fancier they are, the less likely they are to survive. I’ve tried the pretty blue ones (C. flexulosa hybrids) in the past and they don’t ever recover from their first dormancy. I’ve also tried the less fancy C. lutea and found it to be coarser and weedy, but welcome in a shady, difficult spot. My happy Corydalis medium is Corydalis solida. This ephemeral spring bulb is up with the snowdrops and blooms just after. Mine were blooming in the memory garden by the end of February.

The first success I experienced with this plant is a bulb planted in the pot with my Osmanthus delvayi. The pot is very full of Osmanthus roots, as this shrub has been in that pot for about eight years. The Corydalis is probably seven years old, and it never fails to impress each March. By the summer, when I’m struggling to keep the Osmanthus watered, the Corydalis has disappeared altogether.

My goals for 2020 with Corydalis solida are to feed them all well and also to add a few new kinds to the memory garden and pots in the fall.

I’ve scaled way back on seed starting for non-native plants because I’m really gearing up for native plant propagation, but there are still probably too many exotics that I will be starting for pots and the garden this year.

Three weeks ago, I planted the seeds of Datura “Belle Blanche”, Eryngium, Monarda, and Asarina. They have all germinated and are trying to get started on the heating pad in the window.

I also pulled all the seeds out of the refrigerator today and moved them into the greenhouse (native plants) and out to the shelves by the greenhouse (all others). There were about ten pots of seeds that ended up on the shelves, including large pots for acorns–I had collected about a dozen over the autumn. There are three seed trays in the greenhouse, along with a small pot of Cyclamen graecum seeds. In addition, there were pots with things like Asclepias speciosa, Allium cernuum, and various tree and shrub seeds of things like maples, Catalpa, hemlock, burning bush, and more.

In the memory garden, a few things are starting to bloom already–the snowdrops that I planted in fall have bloomed. In addition, the miniature Euphorbia characias is blooming for the first time.

Another plant that I purchased for a work terrarium, three polka-dot plants arrived as three tiny cuttings from a mailorder house in early 2018. They are three different color variants, one whitish, one light pink, and one deep reddish-pink.

The plants ended up in a terrarium and actually grew very happily there. They grow so fast that they end up outside the terrarium, so I clipped them back and take cuttings of the clippings.

Here is a gallery of them.