My route home today took me past the nursery, a dangerous path indeed. Lured in by thoughts of going home and planting in the beautiful sunny afternoon – so far from the choke of grey clouds that looked like imminent rain this morning – I went in and ended up walking home with a tray of seedlings. I’d meant to get more larkspur since the six I already planted were doing so well, but I got distracted by the fact that they’d added creeping snapdragons since my last visit and ended up just getting things for the front garden. Unfortunately I did not realize till I got home that my dragging a watering can out on multiple trip yesterday (well, or perhaps just germination times) meant that a lot more sown-in-situ seeds had turned into seedlings since the last time I’d checked the front garden, so it was much harder to plant things out of the way of everything else already growing than I’d expected it to be.
Why creeping snapdragons, you ask? Because of the windy site, I answer. The nursery manager suggested last year that I try creeping ones since she suspected top-heavy non-creeping snapdragons would be likely to simply snap off in the strong winds that sometimes come to the front garden. Indeed, the creeping ones did well, even though they were tumbling onto the hot concrete wall in summertime. There were a few times when they mostly stopped blooming, but they always recovered, and went on blooming all summer and autumn till killed by an ice storm in November.
Columbine foliage, unfurling yesterday in the back garden
I had, believe it or not, never seen a columbine until I moved in to a home whose garden had, at some point, had one planted and which had subsequently seeded itself around into nooks and crannies (including a plant tucked in between the back staircase and the patio). When I first saw them bloom I thought, ‘What is this beautiful plant?’ Having discovered they were called columbines, and that they came in singles and doubles, short-spurred and no-spurred and long-spurred, various colors and combinations of colors, and one native to this area, I set about planting more. And since that day, I plant them everywhere that I plant things in the ground, I plant them. I don’t know why I was so charmed by them from the first time I laid eyes upon them, but I was, and remain so. Columbines do well in, well, to be honest, most conditions it seems, but they seem to do especially well in sites that get a fair amount of sun but not completely full sun and have average to rich soil. They seem much more tolerant of dry conditions than many partial-shade plants. Sometimes they start to look tattered by mid-summer, at which point you can shear them
Fern-leaved/fringed bleeding heart (native Dicentra eximia), budded yesterday
I love this little shade garden plant, its dainty ferny leaves, its arching sprays of heart-shaped flowers in reddish-pink or white in mid- to late spring. I also love its less-common-in-nurseries cousins, the colorfully named “squirrel corn” and “Dutchman’s breeches”, though I am not currently growing them. All three prefer some shade and consistent soil moisture, though they aren’t nearly as fussy as some shade garden plants.
