Here’s some pics from the middle of February 2009… Something to look forward to…

Celandine Poppy

(Stylophorum diphyllum)
The woods poppy is native to the Eastern half of the US & Canada… You’ve GOTTA luv the natives… Plant em and forget em! Celandine Poppy increases by seed when there’s plenty of organic material in the shade garden… They have lots of tiny seeds like any other poppy…
I spent several years wondering why we got so few wood poppies… Eventually figured out that in pulling the chickweed every year in February, and putting down fresh wood chips, I was smothering future generations of wood poppies…
Missed out applying fresh mulch one year due to the failure of the tree service to drop any off… Plenty of wood poppies appeared!

Trillium

Gotta luv these guys! Another native, Trillium Trillium cuneatum are some very slow growing plants… Don’t pick them…. They won’t grow new leaves this season, and next year, they won’t be as large… Stupid deer occasionally browse on these guys… that kinda sux…

Bloodroot

Bloodroot are cool… another native, a slow growing spring ephemeral growing from a tuber… The native Americans are said to have used the root for a dye… I think bloodroot are too cool to ever treat them as anything but a valuable addition to the shade garden.

Trout lily

(Erythronium americanum)
The Native trout lily come up from a tiny bulb… It isn’t a plant that I’d want to attempt establishing from a store bought bulb… When I’ve planted those, Not much has happened…
These trout lilies were wild collected with permission… A single undivided clump is the way to go… A lot of care must be taken with that clump… air dry the bulbs even a little results in a loss of a beautiful plant…
These jewels are related to the dog-tooth violet which is very pretty in it’s natural setting, and difficult to collect for the garden…

Corydalis

This corydalis is super easy to grow. Apparently native to the western US…
Not all corydalis are the same! There’s a small variety that grows wild nearby that seeds like crazy! Once I collected it, and brought it to the garden, it was everywhere! It was almost as pervasive as chickweed! Well… that’s an exaggeration… chickweed is about 5 times worse… But… There were plenty of corydalis to thin out… And to pull before they set seed…
This fern-leaf corydalis spreads enough where they can be shared with admiring neighbors, but not nearly so much that I’d warn people against planting them.

There are a lot of bulb corydalis that are difficult to grow in my southern garden… I sure do enjoy looking at them in the catalog…

I’m not going to discuss daffy-dills in this post, While they are February bloomers, they are simply a different kettle of fish…

I originally published these pictures in Feb 2009 at the myspace shade garden group. As myspace has seen fit to burn our groups, I’m reposting the small amount of information that I can salvage…