I imagine it was brother Tim who introduced me to this plant back when we were both kids. He seemed to always know every plant, at least by common name. I clearly remember seeing this plant growing wild by the Cedar River when my Dad took me fishing there in my early teens. Fragrant flowers stick in your mind that way.

When a plant grows well for you, you end up loving it even more. The Douglas fir bed has turned out to be an ideal spot for these short-lived perennials that self-seed ambitiously. I started with a packet of seeds of the white variety and now I have a wonderful mix of white, light lavender, and deeper lavender.

I especially like these plants under Leon’s Miracle Grow sculpture–they add to the whimsy his sculpture projects.

The plants have seeded into the lawn a bit and now into the memory garden nearby, but they are easy to root out or to move to another spot. They are considered invasive in some areas. 2020 may see their perfect Douglas fir site reinvented as a native plant garden, but it seems likely some dame’s rockets will remain.

Like many plant fanatics, I always try to bring a piece of my vacation home with me upon my return–usually in the form of seeds. This Agave was an ambitious smuggling effort. Leon and I had traveled to the south of Spain and stayed in a wonderful hostel/hotel in Torremolinos. We swam in the beautiful pool there and ate in the restaurant that the hostel owner ran in the evenings. It was a magical few days. I noticed one of the agaves had pups starting around the mother plant, so I popped off a tiny one and slipped it into one of my socks in my suitcase. Not only did I avoid prison, but the offset rooted when I got home and has been growing very slowly ever since. That was about 1997.

I made an attempt to give this plant to some friends who have a house in Lodi where it could grow outside. The plant went down in the trailer with Leon, but somehow there was a mix-up and it never got passed to his cousin and came back in the trailer, as well. It is a well-traveled plant! And obviously wants to stay with me.

My 2020 plans for this plant are to top-dress it with some sandy, fertile soil and move it outside in some very bright sun when the weather warms.

Brother Tim had was involved in Fuchsia clubs and societies back in the 1990s and I joined him in the Northwest Fuchsia Society for several years. During that time, we would attend all manner of Fuchsia plant sales, and encourage our friends and family to support those sales, as well. Our friend Linda purchased this fuchsia tree at one of the sales–I’m guessing maybe twenty-three years ago. She was living in a condo at the time and didn’t have a way to overwinter it, so she passed it to me. I’ve been caring for it ever since.

There is a lot to like about this tree. Cardinal is a very hardy cultivar. It comes through the winter in the greenhouse without flinching and it blooms pretty well every year. I’ve moved it up in pot size over the years, but it has been in the same pot for at least a decade.

The blooms typically arrive any time from late spring to mid-summer and last right through until the plant gets moved into the greenhouse in late October. Hummingbirds absolutely love this plant and they will seek it out, even inside the greenhouse.

I’m surprised I don’t have more and better photos of this plant! Maybe, because it is always there, I take it for granted.

My 2020 plans for this tree are to trim it back in spring (and strike the cuttings) and turn it out of the pot, root prune it, and put fertile, good soil in the pot before placing it back inside. I will keep pinching the branches back through the early summer to help ensure a bevy of flowers for the hummers and for me! Maybe Linda will want it back one day, so I plan to keep it growing well!

Here is a plant purchased at least a dozen years ago from Plant Delights nursery. This was just at the beginning of the Hellebore craze with all the hybridizing just starting. I ordered two different hybrids. One of them has since passed on, which is an accomplishment in and of itself–it is pretty tough to kill a Hellebore.

The living plant is a disappointment in some ways. I think it might be called Winter Wren. The plant has white flowers that face down and have a small dark maroon eye around the center. The flowers get black spots all over them on the outside some years, and I assume this is related to rain, despite being planted under the Douglas fir tree.

I plan to give this plant some extra fertilizer this year. There will be a bunch of changes in the Douglas fir bed as I add native plants, so this plant may end up in a new situation–possibly a happier one.

Here is another old-timer, a deep maroon-flowered Lenten rose that was gifted to Leon and me over twenty years ago from our friends Bonnie and Pam. The plant lasted longer than their relationship with each other, to be sure, and longer than our relationship with them–it has probably been fifteen years since we’ve heard from either one of them. But the plant lives on and reminds us of the good times we had with them.

Some of these photos are horrible, but I still like them. They help capture the essence of this wonderful plant and the richness of the flower color. This plant is growing in our woodland garden the entire time and it blooms most years, but not with the exuberance of the white hybrids in the yard. I’m not sure if it is the cultivar that is weaker, or the gardener’s weakness affecting the plant.

My 2020 goals for this plant will be to get some fertilizer spikes near it to see if maybe it will grow a bit larger and flower a lot more.

A more recent addition to the garden from sister Cate and her wife, Zoe, this plant was gifted to me when she moved from a rental house and allowed Tim and me to raid the garden. I’m guessing this was six years ago. This gorgeous cultivar is planted in the orchard garden near the fence. It not only blooms wonderfully each year, but it also sets seeds and has seedlings come up around it each year.

This hard-working perennial never fails to give a late winter show in February and March. My 2020 plans for this plant include pulling up the seedlings beneath it and trying to grow them on. Otherwise, this plant doesn’t ask for anything and it gives plenty!

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.