It didn’t take long, and it didn’t take much warmth. Things are popping in the garden. Today’s topic is native spring ephemera; the hallmark of spring ephemera is that they come up early and then disappear completely sometime in the summer. They are also usually very small plants.
Virginia bluebells, Mertensia virginica, are an oddity size-wise: even freshly germinated seedlings are large; they bud in shades from bubblegum pink through mauve, get fairly big very fast, bloom prolifically in a beautiful clear blue, and then keel over. They need to be planted where something even bigger and more distracting will come up because they literally keel over and linger, yellowing, before dying.
Twinleaf, Jeffersonia diphylla, pops out of the ground with their flower buds wrapped in the middle of the leaves. The flowers are nice, nothing remarkable, but the seedpods are. I am not going to give away their secret yet. This is a plant that starts neat and stays neat. The clumps grow larger and the plant spreads in a trail; perhaps the big seeds have help.
Rue anenome, Thalictrum thalictroides, starts out very much in the pink; in another month the flowers will be white and the leaves will be a dark green. It spreads outward from each plant, so I think the seeds are just getting tossed around.
Dutchman’s breeches, Dicentra cucullaria, is a lovely little plant that rode home, in secret, with something else. I don’t even remember what the “something else” was at this point—but when this came up, I looked at it and thought there was something familiar about it, so I left it alone. It came up wedged against the trunk of a pawpaw that is under the silver maple, so it gets plenty of sun and water until the silver maple leafs out.
I figured if it started running rampant, I would just dig it up and compost it, but it was well behaved. A year or two later it bloomed. The flowers are terrific.
It is in the same family as bleeding hearts. The plants start out teeny-tiny; foliage pops out, then the flowers, and then it goes dormant before the summer heat. However, sometime late last summer I noticed little pink clumps peeking out of the ground—corms—that looked like kernels of mutant corn—the corms break apart very easily, and critters dig and rearrange them. That’s probably how it rode home in the first place.
I decided to do a little rearranging of my own, so I could get these little plants closer to the edge of their bed. Those little pink kernels that break off the corms are awfully small, and I really wasn’t sure I was going to get anything.
This photo is one that only a gardener could love: if you look very carefully, you will see a few dozen tiny new plants—Dutchman’s breeches. That’s the thing I love the most about spring—every day brings another surprise—and almost all of them are pleasant.
These photos were taken with an iPhone 5s. The only adjustment made to any of these photographs is cropping.