By Steve Chamberlain
Contributing Writer
I have continued removing hostas from outside the fence and replacing them with plants from inside the fence, which the deer have never touched. One group that caught my interest was Solomon’s seals. Three different species are commonly grown in our gardens, and I found I have extras of all three.
The native large Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum) is all green with pairs of white flowers under the stem. The European Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegata’) is a bit smaller and is most commonly seen in the white-margined cultivar. The dwarf Japanese Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum humile) is tiny by comparison and almost a ground cover. All three of these make very architectural clumps and I have planted them in a cascading line from largest to smallest at one edge of the bed.
One of my favorite grasses is the native north sea oats, which stays less than three feet tall and gets really ornamental seed pods. These have been seeding and getting weeded for years inside the fence. I dug up about a dozen and clumped them together for another back-of-the-bed plant that deer won’t touch.
Pulmonaria (lungwort) is an interesting shade tolerant genus from Europe and Asia. It typically has some amount of white spotting on its green leaves making it look like it is paint spattered. It is one of the first plants to bloom in the spring with blossoms in white, pink, red, and blue. I planted several named cultivars many years ago in the back garden. All of them were medium to dark green with small white circular spots and flowers in the colors above.
I also planted some red-flowering Pulmonaria rubra, which has no spotting on its leaves. Over the years I have learned several things about lungworts. First of all, they hybridize and self-seed like crazy. For the past decade or more, we treated them as weeds except where they belong. Then for a while, I moved the bigger out-of-place plants to one bed in the back of the garden. Secondly, they don’t transplant very easily. I have tried giving my excess to the local garden club sale, but they were always wilted and blah looking.
As it happens, we did not do spring weeding in the back garden last year, so the pulmonaria seedlings were joined by new seedlings from this season. As I was tromping around looking for plants to move outside the fence, I discovered several large pulmonaria plants with spectacular unusual markings. So we decided to move several of these to the new bed. We dug the holes, filled them with water, dug the plants with a large “root ball” and lowered them into the water-filled planting holes. Then we watered the whole bed for four hours at the end of the day. These homegrown, unnamed pulmonaria seedlings never wilted at all and look completely spectacular. My good feelings toward the genus have been restored.
Another cool plant I discovered hiding in the back garden was a peculiar strap-leafed fern. I’ve lost the original tags, but they were supposed to be cold-hardy bird’s nest ferns. Probably it’s some unusual fern that looks like a bird’s nest fern, but is not. Whatever, I really like it and it’s a great addition to the foliage display outside the fence.
Daffodils and alliums are two bulbs that do well in our climate and don’t get eaten by deer. I’ve always tended to use ‘Dutch Master’ for yellow and ‘Mount Hood’ for white daffodils. They are truly perennial and are widely available and cheap. So I’ve bought 250 Dutch Master bulbs on sale as the fall bulb season winds down and planted them among the other plants to produce a riot of color in the spring. I may also plant a few alliums in the back of the bed if I can find any left this fall.
Overall, I’m having a lot of fun rescuing hostas from the voracious hordes and replacing them in the earth with interesting “browsing immune” perennials that were already hiding in the garden.
