Viewing comments posted by Cyclaminist

This plant has lovely dark green and almost leathery leaves. It blooms in midsummer here, and has dusky blue-purple flowers. It seems to be very drought-tolerant; I have it growing on top of a hill in dry soil, surrounded by Sideoats Grama Grass (Bouteloua curtipendula) .

I bought seeds from Prairie Moon Nursery and started them in a pot. They all came up, and I hope they'll do well in the garden, because mint family plants are great for attracting bees and other insects! This should be a good plant for our dry soil.

Unlike Virginia Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum), this one doesn't have fragrant leaves, or at least my plants don't. The leaves taste a little bitter, but that's all. But all mountain-mint flowers provide food for short-tongued bees and wasps. Because the flowers are tiny, these insects can reach into them to drink the nectar. A great plant to attract predators that will eat garden pests.

This plant has fragrant minty-smelling leaves, unlike its close relative Narrowleaf Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium) . The tiny purple-spotted white flowers attract short-tongued bees, and many species of harmless wasps.

This is a plant that should be grown more often. Don't be afraid to plant it because it attracts wasps. This plant does not attract yellow jackets and hornets, the dangerous wasps that attack and sting people, only the harmless wasps that eat garden pest insects. It's good to have wasps around the garden.

A lovely native annual. I bought one plant several years ago, and new ones have come up from seed every year since. The leaves are palm-like, the flowers are yellow, and the pods are long and flat. After the seeds ripen, the pods dry up and twist, catapulting the seeds away from the parent plant. The seeds are dark brown and diamond-shaped.

I highly recommend this plant, if you have a wild (less formal) garden. Both its leaves and flowers are pretty, and it blooms for a long time. It's very beneficial to native insects, because many bees gather pollen from it. It needs to be planted more often.

We have this tree, planted by a previous owner. It must be a cultivar, but I don't know how to find out which one. The leaf scales branch a lot, resulting in a pretty tight structure. Other varieties can be more feathery- or ferny-looking. It self-seeds a bit, and I'm growing one seedling as a bonsai.

According to Minnesota Wildflowers (https://www.minnesotawildflowe...), Phlox divaricata subsp. divaricata is distinguished from subsp. laphamii by having notches at the end of the petals, and it only occurs from Illinois eastward.

Golden alexanders and its relative heart-leaved alexanders (Zizia aptera) are host plants for the caterpillars of the black swallowtail butterfly (Papilio polyxenes), which eat the leaves. These caterpillars will also eat parsley, even though parsley is not native to North America. Black swallowtail is a beautiful black butterfly with yellow spots and blue and red patches, and the caterpillar looks interesting, with black and green stripes and yellow dots.

If you plant golden alexanders, you can look for black swallowtail butterflies laying eggs and maybe watch a caterpillar grow to maturity, and you'll help increase the numbers of these beautiful creatures. And you can watch the short-tongued bees drinking nectar from the flowers.

In Minnesota, this is considered an invasive species. It forms thick carpets of leaves in the woods, and chokes out the native spring ephemerals. The bulbs are very hardy, despite our consistently below-freezing winters; they will survive even if they're sitting right on top of the soil and are blown on by the dry and freezing winter winds. The plants spread by seed, and seedlings bloom after 4 or 5 years. Seedlings pop up in random spots several feet away from the parent plants. There are no natural pests.

However, carpets of Siberian squill are beautiful in April when they're in full bloom; they look like sky-blue mist above the ground. So some people don't mind the fact that the plant is invasive. A spring lawn covered in Siberian squill is prettier than a lawn with just grass.

Surprisingly, this survives the winter in the sheltered and shady area between our house and the next, though not all plants make it through the winter. Many sources say this is hardy to zone 6 or 7, but our zone is 5 with freezing temperatures for 2 and a half months.

I planted this in a half whiskey barrel filled with compost to give it wet soil. It survived the winter, but lost its flower buds. Needs to be buried to protect it.

This azalea is very winter-hardy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I've got a plant that has sat out in a pot for two winters, and though several other plants I had in pots died last winter, this one hasn't suffered significant die-back. I need to plant the poor thing in the ground, though. It's evergreen and has lovely little leaves, pointy at the leaf-stem end and rounded at the other end, and with veins and little reddish hairs.

My plants have flowers of a very striking shade of deep almost magenta purple, a color I haven't seen mentioned online.

I bought the bleeding-heart vine (the name I prefer) about 5 years ago from the Friends School Plant Sale. I'm a fan of the Fumarioideae subfamily (bleeding-hearts and corydalis), and have several species in my garden.

The bleeding-heart vine is a biennial, growing as a rosette of fernlike leaves in the first year and then producing a vine and blooming in the second year. In the second-year plant, the ends of the leaves form tendrils and twine around things that they touch, holding up the vine. The flowers are rather small bleeding-heart type things with three points at the end. This species belongs to the poppy family, and the pouch is made up of four petals like all poppy flowers. The flowers grow in clusters, and are either pink or white. Not sure if this is genetic variation or due to growing conditions.

After the flower blooms, it produces pods that are enclosed in gray dried flower petals. The seeds germinate rather unpredictably, and it's best to sprinkle them over a wide area and wait for them to germinate. When they form a little rosette of leaves, you can move them to a better position. They're not too hard to transplant, if you keep in mind that they have a narrow set of taproots that are fairly brittle. They can be bare rooted briefly, if you make sure to press the soil carefully around the roots and water deeply.

The plant grows well in moist shade, but I think it prefers to have its roots shaded and moist, and its leaves in the sun.

The European cyclamen is one of two cyclamen species that aren't summer-dormant. The leaves grow in summer, last through the winter, and wither the next summer when another flush of leaves replace them. The flowers are fragrant, with a fragrance similar to Sweet Violet (Viola odorata), more pleasant than the soapy scent of florist's cyclamens. Outdoors, they bloom from June until November, when the freezing temperatures stop them. Not a huge number of flowers at once, but several flowers on each plant for many months. Light magenta with a darker nose is the most frequent color, but white, pink, and deep magenta also occur.

I grew my plants from seed ordered from Jan Bravenboer in the Netherlands, and I have many different leaf patterns, from all-green to green-and-silver to all-silver. Silver leaves are the rarest, and I hope to grow more plants with silver leaves, or leaves with larger patches of silver. The leaves form a mound above the tuber, and if you plant one tuber every 8 inches, they cover the ground.

The European cyclamen is the hardiest in continental climates. In England, the ivy-leaved cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium) is hardier and the European cyclamen doesn't grow as well, but that might be because the European cyclamen comes from the Alps and prefers continental climates: warm summers and cold winters.

European cyclamen is the only cyclamen that I can grow outdoors in the winter. Here in Minneapolis, Minnesota the average daily high temperature from December to February is below freezing, and the average yearly coldest temperature is -20 degrees Fahrenheit. European cyclamens are evergreen, so the leaves are frozen all winter and can look dried out at the end of the winter because the roots can't supply them with water while the soil is frozen, but as soon as the soil thaws they fill out again. See my picture of the leaves in early spring after the soil thawed. In a climate like mine, it's best to grow them in partial shade, because winter sun dries out the leaves, and summer dryness makes the leaves wilt.

I grow this cyclamen in a pot, since it's unlikely to be hardy outdoors in Minnesota.

I tried to grow ivy-leaved cyclamen outdoors, and it survived one winter, but another winter it died. It's not reliably hardy in Minnesota. So now I grow it in the basement under lights in the winter.

According to Bleeding Hearts, Corydalis, and Their Relatives, Dicentra 'King of Hearts' is a hybrid of three bleeding-hearts: Komakusa (Dicentra peregrina) , the Japanese and Siberian alpine species, crossed with a hybrid of Oregon bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa subsp. oregona) , the southern Oregonian and northern Californian subspecies of the Pacific Coast species, and Wild Bleedingheart (Dicentra eximia) , the Appalachian species. It was developed by Marion Ownbey of Washington State University. It's like Dicentra peregrina in preferring cool temperatures and having bluish gray-green leaves.

I've grown it for several years in a spot with morning sun and shade for most of the rest of the day. Last year I finally divided it and now have four or five small plants around an Azalea (Rhododendron 'Rosy Lights') bush.

According to Bleeding Hearts, Corydalis, and Their Relatives, Dicentra 'Luxuriant' is a hybrid of three species of bleeding-heart: Wild Bleedingheart (Dicentra eximia) , the Appalachian species, Pacific Bleeding Heart (Dicentra formosa) , the Pacific Coast species, and Komakusa (Dicentra peregrina) , the Japanese and Siberian alpine species.

I used to grow it, but it took a lot of watering, and eventually died. The book also says it doesn't like hot and humid climates, and unfortunately Minneapolis is pretty warm in the summer. Dicentra eximia is much easier to grow here.

Dicentra eximia, the Appalachian species of bleeding-heart, is often confused with Pacific Bleeding Heart (Dicentra formosa subsp. formosa) , and Dicentra formosa and hybrids with Dicentra formosa are often sold as Dicentra eximia. The difference is in the flower shape. Dicentra eximia has slender flowers with longer outer petal tips that are bent back farther, while Dicentra formosa has fatter flowers with shorter petal tips that are not bent back as far.

Dicentra eximia is tolerant of hot and humid summers (unlike Dicentra formosa), and the flowers have a slight jasmine-like fragrance, which can be smelled on warm and still days, or if you lean down to the flowers.