I write this on Valentine’s Day. The arctic vortex has brought us extraordinarily cold weather, but fortunately, there is snow cover to provide some insulation in the garden. So, as I sit hiding indoors, I started thinking about what a Valentine’s Day garden plant might be. Although the seasonal timing is all wrong, the shape of the flowers is perfect — bleeding hearts.
The classic bleeding heart grown in gardens since Victorian times is native to Japan, Korea, northern China and Siberia. It was first brought to England in the 1840s by the famous Scottish plant hunter (and botanist) Robert Fortune, who also brought back hostas! The heart-shaped flowers are rose pink with white bottoms and are lined up along an arching, almost horizontal stem.
The old name for this species was Dicentra spectabilis. Recently, botanists decided to divide up the large universe of bleeding hearts into those whose stems come straight from the roots and those with branching stems. So D. spectabilis became Lamprocapnos spectabilis; however, nearly everyone, including many botanists, still use the old name.
There are two cultivars of interest. ‘Alba’ has white heart-shaped flowers and usually grows more vigorously than the species. ‘Gold Heart’ has bright gold leaves, originated at Hadspen Garden in England, and was introduced in 1997. I grow ‘Gold Heart’ in my garden and it is amazingly vigorous, lighting up the garden from spring well into summer like a little bonfire. Both the species and the cultivars do best in moist soil, partial shade and cool conditions. They emerge robustly in the spring, bloom and then persist until cumulative summer heat causes them to go dormant. If left undisturbed, they become larger slowly from year to year until they form a small herbaceous bush.
There are two native American species of bleeding heart, D. formosa and D. exima. The first is native to the Pacific coast from California north into southern British Columbia and Vancouver Island. It was collected in 1792 by the Scottish naturalist Archibald Menzies during his Vancouver Expedition and taken to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. After being grown in gardens in Europe, it finally made its way into American gardens when the plant became available commercially in Boston about 1835.
D. exima grows in the wild from southern Pennsylvania to Tennessee and North Carolina. It resembles D. formosa and is often confused in the trade. Complicating matters still further are the several noteworthy cultivars such as ‘Luxuriant’ and ‘King of Hearts,’ which are hybrids of the two species. I generally think of them together as “the other bleeding hearts.”
In my garden, compared to D. spectabilis, these native species and hybrids are generally more finicky about where they are grown, are not as vigorous, and do not get as large with age. The flowers are not as numerous and tend to be narrower than those of D. spectabilis. My recommendation is this: If you don’t have a bleeding heart in your garden, get D. spectabilis in either rose pink or white and see if you like it.
There are other members of the bleeding heart family that are interesting, but not as easy to grow nor as showy as the three species mentioned above. One is D. canadensis or squirrel corn. It is native to the Northeast, but much smaller with a few white flowers on vertical stems. It is ephemeral, coming up, blooming, and then going dormant in the summer. Another is D. cucullaria or Dutchman’s breeches. It is also native to the Northeast. Blooms are white and showy, but with flowers with two vertical “ears,” hence the common name. In my garden, Dutchman’s breeches sticks around a bit longer into the summer than squirrel corn. Both seem more like curiosities than foundation plants in the shade garden.
Try planting some bleeding hearts in the earth. They bring Valentine’s Day back in the spring!
