Honesty

I’m generally supportive of the border agents' intolerance toward bringing rooted plants back and forth over the border.  I think of all that bind weed and all that herbe robert in my garden and I truly would not want anyone to be accidentally taking it up to British Columbia.  The trouble, though, is that the plants have their own route, their own ideas about where to grow.  I already have both bindweed and herbe robert up in my B.C. gardens, although not anywhere to the extent that they are in the Point Roberts garden, and I am not the agent of transmission.  Birds, I think.  In fact, the major bindweed infestation in my Canadian garden seems to be seriously slowing down after the neighbors very judiciously exercised their Round-Up option.  And I can keep the herbe in check with hand weeding every so often.

The Point Roberts Garden Club is finding its own invasion problems in the Tyee Drive flowerbeds that its members have so generously planted for all our visual delectation, but with horsetail, which I am pretty sure is a native, rather than a noxious weed.  We have it around in both properties, but it mostly grows in the grassy areas rather than in the planted ones so I have a live and let live relationship with it.  It is a plant that, I am told, dates back to the dinosaurean age, and it certainly looks like it. “[It is] the only living representative of the very ancient and primitive class Sphenopsida, tree-sized members of which were prominent in the land vegetation of the Carboniferous era (353-300 million years ago." It is a very elemental kind of plant, but it is infesting their flower beds and they have called for the community to come out and help them get rid of it next Tuesday.  I’m interested in joining them if only to find how you get rid of it.  In my experience, it just breaks off at the soil line, its dinosaur brain planning well for its future growth.

Yet another plant that is growing all over my yard this year is the lunaria plant.  I am seriously hoping that it is not invasive because I planted it myself with full intention.  A few years ago, there were two volunteer lunaria plants and I saved the seeds and planted them and soon there were very many lunaria plants.  I remember them from childhood.  They were a feature of cottage gardens and because of their strange seed pods and their in some ways even stranger name, they caught your attention.  The Latin name is lunaria (from luna, the moon), but I knew them as ‘silver dollar plants.’  They also go by the name ‘honesty’ and ‘money plants,’ and Wikipedia tells me they are known in Holland and Denmark as ‘Judas’ Coins’ and somebody else says they are also called ‘moonwort’  (‘wort’ means ‘plant’ or ‘herb).  How can a plant be named both ‘honesty’ and ‘Judas’s coins’?  

They bloom early in the spring of their second year with beautiful red violet flowers on stalks and then within about 6 weeks, they begin to form the ‘silver dollars’, many of them on a stalk, and each of which holds several seeds.  The dried pod comes in the early fall and lasts everlastingly; a big vase of them is in my kitchen window, shining silver in the sun.  And if this plant turns into a problem plant, I’m going to be seriously disappointed.