Friday Fabulous Flower - Bloodroot

 When the bloodroot flowers, a true native wildflower, they are quite the display; the bright white perianth contrasts nicely with the surrounding leaf litter.  Our local species is the only one, Sanguinaria canadensis, The rhizome oozes a bright red-orange latex, colored latexes are a common feature of the poppy family, and in olden times people thought that looking like blood indicated it was good for treating blood ailments.  Curiously TPP's favorite plants the nutmeg family also produce red latex, and is used in preparing  a hallucinogenic snuff.  At any rate this is a most cheerful little flower.  For many years our garden only had one clump of bloodroot but then if began showing up all over the place.  A leaf wraps around each flower bud.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Purple fumewort

Whenever the Phactors find some new plant it gets tested to see if it will survive under conditions of benign neglect.  Newly planted trees and shrubs are the only things that get TLC.  So it's always nice when some attractive, and even delicate looking new comer proves to be hardy and tough. A number of years ago Mrs. Phactor got Cordylis lutea, as the name suggests a yellow-flowered fumewort, a group of annual to perennial herbs that used to be in their own family, the Fumariaceae. Now they are part of the poppy family to which they are quite similar. They are sort of like a bleeding heart if you only took one-half of the flower. The yellow cordylis starts flowering early and will continue until the frost kills them back.  They have a tendency to weediness, but not so badly that you decide to nuke them.  A couple of other species have been tried unsuccessfully, but Cordylis solida, a blue-purple flowered species, more of a spring-flowering then die-back species, has proven pretty tough growing in three different beds and not showing any bad habits yet. It's quite cheerful as a low-growing edge of a bed plant that doesn't seem particularly palatable to the bun-buns. It may look delicate, but it's tough, quite frost hardy, which is important in our climate of highly changeable spring weather.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Bloodroot

Our persistently warm March weather has really pushed along the flowering.  Here's a wonderful spring ephemeral, bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, featured this week in our gardens.  It's a small, easy to grow, woodland wild flower in the poppy family, and like many members of the family, it has laticifers and oozes latex when injured, red-orange latex in this case thus both the common name and the generic name referencing blood.  In the days of "likes cure likes" medicinal botany, such likes were avidly sought and thought to be clues to the plant's usefulness. The plant multiplies vegetatively forming such patches in just a couple of years, and here and there seedlings will also appear.  But even a smallish woodland garden has room for lots of these. Each flower has a leaf  wrapped around its flower stalk, a leaf whose rounded apex has characteristic apical sinuses, although they can hardly be seen at flowering stage. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Bleeding Hearts

Oh, April is such a pretty time for our gardens!  Wait, it's still only March!  In another day, when the tally for March is complete the Phactor will reveal some stunning data that promises for a duller April-May.  At any rate one of Mrs. Phactor's gardens develops a wonderful blue-yellow-pink display of bluebells, celandine poppy, and bleeding hearts all kind of patch-worked together.  This is almost a surefire combination, easy enough for almost anyone to grow, tough and hardy, and cheerful beyond saying.  The bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) are quite a spectacular flower on their own, here showing the two rounded "spurs" that account for their generic name.  Bleeding hearts are now also a member of the poppy family the result of the small fumatory family having been found to nest within.