#gallium odoratum

[los-plantalones]

sweet-scented gallium.

[bluebellsandcocklesshells]

Mid-sized traditional shade side yard stone landscaping design concepts. Design ideas for a mid-sized traditional shade side yard stone landscaping.

[meridabears]

Design ideas for a medium-sized traditional shade side yard. Inspiration for a mid-sized traditional shade side yard stone landscaping.

[paeonia-horse]

Woodruff (Gallium odoratum)

[norcalbruja]

Gardening in winter, Part 1

So my mom’s in the Philippines for the next three months, and now I don’t have to worry about staying up too late and annoying her, so I’m posting.

Photo 1: Clockwise from the left is my campanula (campanula portenschlagiana), two pots of lobelia erinus, one teeny-tiny English violet that I rescued from drowning, and one nearly-eaten pot of lobelia mumble-mumble. The last plont is an impulse-buy of sweet woodruff (gallium odoratum), since my mom won’t be here for three months and I’m just going buck-wild.

I got the vague-lobelia from a craft store; it's from the Dunecraft company and came in a tiny little egg-cup for a “fairy-garden” mini-planter. My dumb ass used to throw away all the tags/packets/plant-names without even trying to write them down, so here’s a photo of the vague-belia from New Year’s Eve, before it got eaten to the roots. Probably by snails, because for such allegedly slow animals, those motherfuckers spring up overnight.

I am low-key calling the vague-belia my “Neptune lobelia,” because last year I was getting into planet magic and I gravitated to Neptune because we’re both weird-ass artists. And then I found out Neptune likes lobelia, so I’m like SHIT, DON’T I HAVE SOME LOBELIA SEEDS??? HI, PLANET FLOWER.

The giant pot has smoll strawberries. (Fragaria vesca, alpine strawberries.) And some smoll plonts. My sister tends to call them “weeds,” but I like seeing plonts instead of a neat, boring pot of dirt, so I call them “roommates.” It’s gonna take a couple more weeks for me to see anything growing, and alpine strawberries have THE SMOLLEST SPROUTS.

Zoom in on the Smoll Violet (top) and its grass roommate (bottom). I've been watching and watering this tiny little root-bud for a few weeks and IT HAS GREEN NOW. SO HAPPY.

Zoom in on my regrowing Neptune-belia, that tiny blip of red in the middle. I love me the green plants, but I love plants with freaky colors/textures even more. 

Big plont: JASMINE, MOTHERFUCKERS. Polyanthum, specifically, so it’s got the little star-shaped flowers, not the big floofy tea flowers. It’s getting a little yellow because California doesn’t know whether they want RAIN or MORE DROUGHT, so it was in the sun by the patio door for a while until I moved it back to the fence.

Berries are very shiny and black, but according to the internet, they’re poisonous. Don’t worry, I got it for the smell and the pretty flowers, not tea.

Closeups of the berries and flower-buds.

You can’t see them and I forgot to zoom in on for a photo, but the jasmine has lots of smoll roommates that are very consistently shaped and spaced, and they’ve been popping up for a while. I don’t know if they’re runners from the roots, or seedlings from the berries that ripened.

Man, those berries are SO SHINY AND JUICY-LOOKING. I was so upset when I found out they were poisonous. 

[athertonjc]

Embracing an “invasive native” by Elizabeth Licata

Like many beginning gardeners, I was initially attracted by easy, “do it all” solutions. I soon learned that there are no such things, but that was after I bought a can of “wildflowers for shade.” I sprinkled the seeds into an impossible spot between a big maple, our back wall, and the neighbor’s boundary fence. (The great thing about these seed cans is that there is no indoor-starting, soaking, stratification or any of that geeky seed stuff. They are just assumed to work if directly sown, no matter what they are.)

(with the gallium, hellebore, and a few other things)

Eventually a few plants came up, but I only remember the hesperis matronalis (Dame’s Rocket), a known thug around here that did not survive for long. The sole plant that remains, eighteen years after I sprinkled those seeds, is anemone canadensis, which, at first, I took for some kind of geranium (cranesbill), but eventually looked up and found its true identity. For a while, it stayed where it was sown, putting up a discreet clump every year. It got sick of its admittedly cruddy, northeast-facing position though, and, over the last five years, has sidled around the tree trunk and is now westward bound. The anemone is duking it out with a huge hellebore clump and rampant gallium odoratum (sweet woodruff) that has long held this space. And it’s more than holding its own—even against the gallium!

This is a native plant that is found in a pretty wide distribution throughout the Northeast and Midwest, in spite of having Canada in its name. (They have it there too.) It laughs at shade and doesn’t requite nearly as much moisture as its descriptions suggest.

I know that Canada is looking pretty good to many of us these days. I wouldn’t go so far as to consider emigration, but I do welcome this indigenous product to my garden.

P.S.: Some commenters have, understandably, questioned the term “invasive native” in the title of this post. I deliberately used it, as it is the term used by a native plant vendor when I asked for the plant. It is a weird term to use, admittedly. So I put it in quotes, as it is not my term.

Embracing an “invasive native” originally appeared on Garden Rant on June 6, 2018.

from Garden Rant http://gardenrant.com/2018/06/embracing-an-invasive-native.html

[littlecitygarden]

Galium odoratum. Sweet woodruff. This is a lovely little groundcover that tolerates shade (it's natural setting is in the woods). It has little fragrance when it's green, but it'll knock your socks off when dried. Apparently, this is due to a high concentration of coumarin. It's the traditional flavoring for may wine and also historically used in brewing beer (mumm) before we got to the all hops all the time of today.

[ratatoskm15]

Sweet Woodruff sprouting forth between a railway sleeper and the path. It's Latin name is Gallium odoratum and two more common ones are Master of the Woods and Wild Baby's Breath