Coneflowers are so common and popular today that they might be considered trite or overused. Catalogs abound with myriad cultivars. The excellent substance and coloring of these flowers earn them a place in any sunny border. They don’t seem as common in Seattle as they probably are in the midwest or east coast. In fact, the three plants I have in the memory garden are the only ones I know of in the neighborhood.

My plants resemble the standard species. I don’t recall if they have a cultivar name. I grew them from seed in 2017 for planting out in the memory garden. The cones of coneflowers are my favorite part–the color is the perfect contrast to the petals and they glow differently with various sun exposures.

These plants are very self-sufficient, including being significantly drought tolerant. I sprinkle them a few times in the hottest weeks along with the other plants in the memory bed. I fertilize them in spring to encourage them to bulk up and bloom more–it seems to be working. They are much showier this year than last.

One of my newest plants, I started this from seed in spring 2020. Several germinated and I’ve kept them moving along, not expecting flowers this first year and intending to winter them over in the greenhouse and see if I might be blessed with Devil’s trumpets in 2021. The biggest of the seedlings had other ideas, however, and threw a bud and flowered this week (July 15th). It was gorgeous to look at, but I never caught much of a whiff of any fragrance. However, I didn’t get out at night to check on it, so when the next flower opens, I’ll set some alarms!

The species, D. metel, has an interesting provenence. It is unknown in the wild and according to Wikipedia:

…it seems clear that D. metel is essentially a collection of cultivars and recent critical authors have found it impossible to recognise a wild type for the species. This view is supported by the tuberculate capsules found in D. metel (as compared with the spinose capsules of other species) and the retention of seeds on the placenta, at least in cultivars ‘Fastuosa’ and ‘Chlorantha’. Both of these traits suggest cultivar selection…The variants of D. metel have been widely grown as ornamentals over a long period of time…There is no evidence that the variants arose from horticultural plant breeding in the Old World…These facts taken together strongly suggest that D. metel was a well-established cultivated species with a range of forms in its place of origin and that these forms arrived ready-made in Europe.^[4]

2020 might see me potting this plant on yet again to a bigger pot and feeding and watering it religiously in the hopes of coaxing more spectacular blooms from it. I’ll do the same with the other seedlings to see if they catch up and bloom, too, then I’ll tuck them in the greenhouse for the winter and hope they come back bigger and better in year two.

From sister Cate about seven years ago, these spectacular cormous perennials make a big splash in the orchard garden every July. There are so many traits to like about these plants–the foliage is clean and contrasts well with mounded plants, the flowers buds unfurl in a very artistic way, the flowers themselves are plentiful, brilliant scarlet with yellow inside. From a care standpoint, the only important thing (and the one I fail at consistently) is that my plants need staking. They tend to flop, maybe because they are in part sun.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to clip some flowers for the house and set up a better staking system. I also plan to peel away some of the corms in late winter to pot up for sales and gifts.

The most hated weed in my garden is also a beautiful plant…hedge bindweed has lovely white flowers this time of year. The problem with the plant, like all weeds, is that it grows where it isn’t wanted. It twines around all the other plants in the garden, overwhelming them and becoming tough to extricate. Late in the season, the plant sends out long exploratory underground stems–they can stretch ten feet or more, and that’s how they gain ground throughout the yard. They are in virtually every flower bed we have and the only thing that keeps them at bay is shade.

My 2020 plans for these plants is to cut them off at ground level wherever I find them and to cut the wandering invaders off as soon as I see them. It will take years to root them out entirely, but I’ll keep working on it.

The miraculous wonderberry started as a fun seed starting experiment and has stayed with me through self-seeding for five or six years now. One of the wonders of wonderberries is how seedlings come up in the worst soil in the dryest raised bed and still manage to thrive and produce sweet berries.

Solanum is a fun plant family, with odd poisonous, prickly, edible, and ornamental members. I was very happy to be able to germinate the wonderberry seeds and grow some on to produce berries. The berries are beautiful and sweet and the plants produce them right up until frost.

My 2020 plans for these plants are to water the volunteers that have come up in the raised garlic bed and to nurture one that came up in a pot in the greenhouse. They are really such generous, easy plants–having them around makes me smile.

When one of my more robust Hippeastrums bloomed, I didn’t pay much attention to the seed pod. And months later, little Hippeastrum plants started springing up in random pots in the greenhouse. I realized then that maybe these plants are that difficult to grow from seed, so I went online and found some seeds for a rare species, H. mandonii. Two of the seeds germinated and I ended up with two strong seedlings.

Since then, however, the plants have gone through strange phases. The main bulbs both died off, but there were several offsets all around them. However, the offsets stayed dinky for a long time. This year, one pot seems ful of dead-looking offsets. I repotted them into new soil and cleaned them up a bit, but they still haven’t leafed out green at all. The second pot, however, is very much alive and well.

My 2020 plans for these plants are to baby them a bit more and hope to coax greater growth and the grand prize, flowers! I imagine flowers are still at least two years away, but from what I’ve seen, they are worth waiting for…

Our Douglas fir is the biggest star of the garden–really BIG! We guess the tree to be at least as old as the house (70 years) and at least 80 feet tall, with a trunk eight feet around at chest height. When we were shopping for a house to buy, I remember hugging this tree the first time I laid eyes on it. There are dozens of trees of similar age and size throughout our Haller Lake neighborhood. They host eagles who come for quick visits until the mobbing crows send them on their way. They host crows nests, bushtit nests, flocks of feeding chickadees, and dozens of other species.

There are some misconceptions about needle evergreens, and the biggest one is that they are somehow less messy than deciduous trees. A tree as big as our Douglas fir dumps millions of needles and pollen cones every year. In addition, there are thousands of cones that drop from the tree, and hundreds of branches snap off in windstorms. As much as possible, we try to tuck anything that the tree drops back under the tree so it can be nourished as it would be in nature.

My 2020 plans for this behemoth are to cut the ivy away from its trunk completely and then us it as the keystone plant in my native plant garden. It provides shade and organic matter to the shrubs and perennials underneath it. It also provides some challenging competition for water and nutrients with its expansive root system. Surprisingly, though, many plants have evolved to grow under trees like this and I’m starting to bring them in.

My daylilies never perform the way that I know they can. For example, there are some growing in a parking lot up the street that are completely covered with flowers. They are drenched in hot sun amidst warm asphalt with little supplemental water, and this year they are spectacular.

My daylilies are blooming, but nothing like those plants. They just don’t get that amount of sun.

I really need to work harder to get these plants to flower more–the flowers are obviously worth the work! For 2020, I’ll work to feed each one a bit more and water a bit more and see if I can coax a few more scapes from each clump.

As kids, my siblings and I were not big fans of these flowers because we felt their flowers smelled like dog poop. As an adult with a poor sense of smell, I think we were probably right when we were young, but the great flower show these plants put on make them worth growing. I started several from seed for the memory garden and they are blooming for the first time now. Turns out some fun wasps really love them, too!

My 2020 plans for these plant are to feed and water them a bit to try to get them to bulk up for an even better show next year. The neighbors across the street have a HUGE planting of daisies about six feet square that is impressive for a couple of weeks every July. And smelly…

Bigleaf Maple is an amazing native tree. My first recollections of this plant are in the park near our house in Kent, Washington, where these trees were part of the woodland, along with Douglas fir, Western Hemock, and Western Red Cedar.

Our nextdoor neighbor here in North Seattle had a big specimen that had been topped at one point and had sent up some big suckers from the base, one of which became a good sized tree of its own. When a new house was built on that property, the tree was killed–only a big stump remains that chickadees nest in.

Our yard isn’t large enough to host a full-sized Bigleaf Maple, but I keep a few saplings around and just prune them back every year so any fauna that is dependent on this plant’s leaves can find some in my yard.

This year, powdery mildew came early and has attacked my maple trees, but I just pruned them back and new shoots will be up in a few weeks, hopefully sans mildew.

My 2020 plans for these trees are to keep them pruned back and enjoy their impressive leaves–they can be up to a food across!