Category — Foliage

What if I told you about an easy-care groundcover that integrates plants beautifully in containers and in the ground in early spring, then dies off to leave space for warm-weather annuals? What it I also added that it’s a plant long treasured by herbalists for its nutritious, healing qualities?

Then what if I told you it was chickweed?

Familiarity breeds contempt, and this European plant from the pink family has made itself at home worldwide, in every kind of climate. I have never planted chickweed, and I have never needed to. Chickweed can produce five generations in a season, and its tiny little star-flowers make lots of seeds.

To some, this means it is simply an invasive pest, to be rooted out. To me, it just goes to prove that maxim, “a weed is a plant that’s in the wrong place.”  While others place it squarely in the pest department (any garden-book writeups seem to talk only about getting rid of it), chickweed is always welcome in my garden. It’s pretty, it doesn’t take over, and it gives me a healing spring treat when I pull it out,. And it’s really easy to pull: about three seconds to clear an area of a few square feet.

This means that chickweed also fits well into the low-water garden: instead of replacing it with hot-weather annuals that you have to water, use it as a groundcover for spring bulbs, then leave chickweed and bulbs unwatered for the summer, the way they like it, for an easy-care seasonal show.

The groundcover technique works in pots, too. Chickweed ties things together and makes sense of the jumble of bulbs in this pot, making it into a tiny landscape. I often have such pots, consisting of small bulbs and offsets that need to grow to flowering size. (I don’t throw bulbs away. I figure if they can reproduce in nature, and in the fields of bulb propagators, I should be able to figure out a way to get them to do it here. Sometimes that actually works. But I always live in hope, so I have a lot of pots of random small bulbs.) Without the chickweed, these pots are no works of art; they just have a tangle of assorted foliage from whatever bulbs I stuck in there.

Even with a container monocrop, chickweed is (as its name might imply) stellar. Notice how the little white asterisks of chickweed blooms complement and echo this pot of ‘L’Innocence’ hyacinth.

Chickweed itself is worth some aesthetic appreciation. Euell Gibbons describes it in detail in Stalking the Healthful Herbs: “You will see a single line of tiny hairs running up one side of the stem. When this line reaches the leaves, it continues up the opposites side of the stem to the next pair, alternating the side of the stem on which it chooses to travel at each pair of leaves. ”

And while I’d noticed the tiny star-like flowers closing at night, and on rainy days, I hadn’t noticed what Gibbons saw at the close of evening: “…the paired leaves approach one another so their upper surfaces fold over the tender, developing butds in their axils, and the outermost pair of fully developed leaves envelop the terminal bud as though trying to protect the tender, growing shoot. ”

But chickweed is more than just beautiful in my eyes. Gibbons points out the nutritious qualities; he cooks it in with other vegetables, and uses it in what he calls a Green Drink, a blendered health drink involving mostly herbs. Many people in my area make this kind of drink, but most of the time I prefer using my herbs in tastier ways. Chickweed isn’t particularly delicious, but it’s not bad, either; sort of bland and juicy and crunchy. Sometimes I make it into a tea with other garden foliage (fresh leaves must be simmered gently, covered, for ten minutes to extract the goodies). Sometimes I throw it in salad (I particularly like it in potato salads, but it doesn’t keep well, so it’s best to use it as a garnish at the last minute.) Sometimes I eat the crunchy stems and leaves just as they are, from the garden.

That’s the way chickens like to eat it, so much, apparently, that they gave this plant its most common common name. Other common names are: Mouse-ear, Satinflower, Starweed, Tongue Grass, White Bird’s-eye, Winterweed.

Winterweed, of course, means that it’s a plant which can be used year-round in many areas. Herbalists took advantage of its high vitamin C content; it’s another scurvy-preventing herb, like miner’s lettuce and strawberry leaves. It also has cooling qualities that may be useful in fevers or as poultices on inflammations and itches. (It’s also very juicy, which makes it easy to use as an emergency poultice for a bug bite or sore. Just mash it between your fingers, or between two rocks, and put it on the affected place.)

Herbalist David Hoffman says that this kind of poultice can even help eczema and psoriasis, while Gibbons points out that the old herbalist’s advice to wash wounds or sores in cool chickweed tea might mean that chickweed has antibiotic qualities.

Some herbalists credit chickweed with additional healing abilities; they use it for colds, coughs, tumors, hemorrhoids, sore eyes, and rheumatism. Others claim it’s useless. My best guess is that many of the benefits of chickweeed have to do with high mineral and vitamin content. Cutting-edge nutritional science is finding out something herbalists have known for centuries: a significant amount of illness stems from vitamin or mineral deficiency, or at least is complicated by it.  But not everyone responds the same way to the same treatment; people’s chemistry differs wildly.  Chickweed may well work for some and not for others.

To me, chickweed is beautiful, nutritious, and the ultimate in easy care. Scoff if you will; it will remain one of the quiet mainstays of my garden.

References:

Magic and Medicine of Plants,  Reader’s Digest Association, 1986

Stalking the Healthful Herbs, Euell Gibbons, David MacKay Co. , Inc, 1966

The Herbal Handbook, David Hoffman, Healing Arts Press, 1988

Theoretically, alpine strawberries are a wonderful match for a woodland garden. But after a decade or so, I’m still waiting for mine to prove it. Alpine strawberries, so the story goes, don’t need as much sun to bloom and fruit. In fact, according to the writeups, they need some shade to thrive. Yellow alpines have berries less attractive to birds, less likely to be marauded. And, since I’d had “white” alpine strawberries (really a pale primrose yellow) from the garden of a market gardener (who rightly only allowed us a few out of one of his highest-paying crops), I knew they tasted great.

Many catalogues carry alpine strawberry seeds instead of the plants; I’ve never had any luck growing these, but I don’t claim to be an expert at growing from seed. (Lucky, that.) Which is why, after several tries, I was happy to find places where I could get a few starter plants (some of those resources are below. The original place where I got my own alpines no longer carries them). Having experimented with some of our local, rhizomous wild strawberries and found them slow going, I was happy to find some alpine strawberries with runners, because I thought I could propagate these more quickly.

Alpine strawberries are supposed to fruit all season, through the summer and fall. They are close to wild strawberries in their breeding, so the fruit and leaves are much smaller than the better-known commerical kinds. (The shape of the fruit is different, too; more like a tiny dunce cap than the fat wedges of store strawberries.) Some of them have runners; some spread by rhizomes. They’re hardy to about -20 degrees F (about -29 degrees C), or zone 5, according to the One Green World catalogue; zones 3 to 9. according to the Raintree catalogue. Rosalind Creasy says that alpine strawberries are good to zone 4; I would tend to trust her the most, since I know she has lots of experience as a hands-on gardener in regular people’s gardens, as opposed to nurseries with all the commercial equipment.

Creasy recommends dividing plants every three or four years for best production. Maybe that’s part of my problem; I have never done this. On the other hand, the plants have rarely looked crowded to me. And the plants she’s discussing appear to be the rhizomous strawberries, not the ones with runners; my theory has been that runners are runners, so I just heel in the new little plants-on-a-string the way Ruth Stout recommends, only in a less-organized fashion.

Creasy recommends morning sun for alpine strawberries, or filtered sun from high-branched trees; she warns against full or afternoon sun, which I have found does indeed burn the leaves. Good places for alpine strawberries are in rockeries, borders, and anywhere you need a quick-growing groundcover. I think they make a nice part of the transition garden, that edge where natives start to take over from imports. They take some summer water, though they aren’t nearly as thirsty as their big-fruited cousins, so be sure to plant alpine strawberries with natives that aren’t moisture hogs, but don’t mind some summer water.

After I gave up on growing strawberries in a strawberry pot for reasons of deadness,  I put them in some of my self-watering containers, where they have lingered, mostly berriless, to this day. They have copiously produced runners, though, possibly for lack of anything else to do in the shade. I don’t recall getting any berries out of either attempt at growing strawberries in a pot.

Some of the alpine strawberries in pots grew so vigorously that they crept over the edge, where they made several rosettes which managed to root themselves in the dry-summer ground. I’ve also grown a few in the ground on purpose, where they obligingly made a pleasant woodsy-looking groundcover, and more plants - but nary a berry. Since I give them the same fertilizers and foliar feeds that produce flowers in my other plants, I’m guessing lack of sun is the problem, though they do get that morning sun or filtered light that everybody seems to recommend. After all, that market gardener who sparked my alpine strawberry lust by feeding me a treasured few of his alpine strawberries - from berry plants that had plentiful fruit - well, that guy grew his alpine strawberries in full sun. It was in the Pacific Northwest, I grant you; their summers are mild. But still. This strengthens my theory that these berries actually need more sun than advertised. If you want berries, that is.

Even though I have only the leaves, they’re still useful. Strawberry leaves are among the winter-growing plants which have a high vitamin C content; vital in times when no other sources of vitamin C are available. Euell Gibbons devised a way to extract it by filling a blender with strawberry leaves, covering with water, then blending only until the leaves are fine-cut; he let the leaves soak in the water overnight (this continues the water extraction of vitamin C), and strained it in the morning. He recommended this in morning green drinks, or as a way to dilute frozen fruit juices.

Strawberry leaves have traditionally been used as an antiscorbutic - which means they’re effective against scurvy. Since scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficiency, it only makes sense.
My own method of getting the benefit out of strawberry leaves is to include them in what I call ‘garden tea’: leaves of whatever is plentiful at any given time. In winter, that’s usually lavender, sage, strawberry leaves, and violet leaves (which also contain vitamin C). I rub them between my hands until they’re bruised, then simmer them several minutes until the tea is bright chartreuse. Most people enjoy this tea, and it’s very enlivening.

Last fall, in yet another attempt to get some actual fruit, I transplanted the alpine strawberries into some plastic bulb bowls-I had a lot more than my original three plants. (Being an overzealous bulb freak, I also planted some Fritillaria meleagris alba in the same bowls, hoping their small white bells would fit in nicely, and that the strawberries would provide them with the moist, cool root run they prefer.) I set the bowls where they’ll get about half a day’s sun with afternoon shade, and gave them the fertilizing regime I’m giving everything over the fall and winter. We’ll see.

References and Resources:

Both catalogues are good sources for information on growing conditions and garden uses of these strawberries.

Raintree catalogue -  has not only the yellow alpine strawberries I planted, but now carries a (presumably really) white alpine strawberry plus two red ones. In addition, there other wild and wild-related strawberries for your delectation.

One Green World catalogue -  carries two kinds of alpines, different varieties than the ones offered by Raintree.

Rosalind Creasy,  The Gardener’s Handbook of Edible Plants, Sierra Club Books, 1986

Ruth Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back: a New Method of Mulch Gardening, orig. published Exposition Press, 1955, with many subsequent printings. The chapter on strawberries is “Love Will Find a Way”.

Dear Pomona,

I would like to tell you about my favourite (I have lots of favourites!) foliage plant Cardoon or Cynara cardunculus.  Doesn’t this look lovely and summery? The picture was taken on February 1st during all the cold weather we were having. The leaves seems to be unaffected by all the weather that an English winter can through at it. The leaves are really big 3 to 4 feet long and a foot or more wide and deeply divided, with a lovely silver sheen.

This plant can grow tall, I mean tall. During the summer this gets to at least 6 feet and has thistle like flowers on. I don’t have any really nice pictures of the flower heads, I am not tall enough! The above picture was taken in August. The downside is that when the stems shoot upwards, there are less lower leaves sometimes I put some annuals around the base but a bit of bare soil in the summer isn’t a problem.

Cynara cardunculus are edible, the stems are eaten. I think these are grown like celery, earthed up to blanch the stems. I have never tried this as I grow cardoon as a ornamental though the first time I saw this plant was in a large walled vegetable garden attached to a historic property. As I know you live in a very different climate, from you, so I look this up in my favourite American gardeners guru’s book (Foliage: Astonishing Color and Texture Beyond Flowers by Nancy J. Ondra). Nan recommend cardoon for zones 6 or 7-10, she also warns that it self-sows prolifically and can be come invasive in some areas. It has never self sown for me, I wouldn’t mind a few seedlings but I have seen packets of seed for sale. In colder climates cardoons can be grown as an annual, which would give you lovely leaves in summer but for me the attraction of this plant is the leaves in winter.

This was taken on 1st February, please excuse the rest of the untidy garden, and shows the beauty of these plants.  I will cut off some of the lower leaves that are trailing on the ground. Then in about June they will start to grown the flower stems, some I will cut off to encourage more leaves. Once the it has flowered in July/August the plant will start to grow new leaves.

For me this is a plant for all seasons, we really can’t ask for more!

Best wishes Sylvia

Most people don’t think of tulip foliage as a color display, but once I saw colors in the early stages of tulips, I got on a roll looking for tulip foliage with pink and red in it. I remembered the pink-edged foliage of the Fosteriana Sweetheart, which I’d noticed and photographed last spring.

And now I’d started looking, I saw foliage with pink-edges, white edges, and deep-red-streaks peeking out of the catalogue pictures of several fosterianas.

I finally got it: reds and pinks on tulip foliage are not unusual. Greggii tulips are known for their striped and mottled foliage; the stripes are usually some form of cream and deep purple-red. kaufmannia tulips are famous for their mottled foliage, too.  Fosterianas other than ‘Sweetheart’ have color in their foliage, too. Colored tulip foliage is all over.

But tulip foliage doesn’t have to be colorful to delight. The broad leaves become a shadow catchment

with the show changing throughout the day.

Those of you who are extra-sensitive might want to skip the next picture: it’s an illustration of what happens when you don’t deer-protect your foliage; the emerging flower bud and stalk gets chomped, leaving only foliage behind to feed the bulb for another year, when, if all goes well, it will flower again..

To cheer us up from this moment of mortality, there’s the wiggly aspect of tulip foliage. I’m not quite sure what makes this happen; I don’t know if it’s related to the kind of tulip, the temperature at certain times of growth, or what. Here is a sea of ‘Apricot Beauty’ and ‘Dreaming Maid’ foliage, in varying degrees of wiggiliness.

Apricot Beauty seems to specialize in wiggily: this is an example of where foliage snared my eye more than flowers:

If the snow comes late, tulip foliage makes wiggily green waves on the white:

This spring, try keeping an eye on all tulips have to offer, right from the first sprout. That way you can prolong garden pleasure without extra work: just put your attention in the right place.

I’ll be writing about one way to preserve tulip foliage from pests soon - but before that, we’re going to have another letter from Sylvia, about a different kind of foliage plant.

Judging by my garden reading, not many people think of tulips as a foliage plant. Yet when I photograph tulips, I find myself being seduced away from even the most beautiful blooms, to the soft curves, wild twists and soft luminescence of foliage. Even the first tiny spears can be a gardener’s delight of anticipation.

Tulip foliage is out well before the blooms, before there’s much happening in most gardens; shouldn’t we welcome it for its constantly-unfolding show? It obliges us even in snow, lighting up the white with sturdy green spears

although even without the snow, the first green, green rabbit-ears poking through the old leaves are a sign of hope:

Not all tulip foliage is green, though, at least not in all its stages.

At first I was going to say I’ve only known two tulips whose foliage noses emerge ashy red: ‘Couleur Cardinal’, a scented heirloom tulip from 1845 (either a Triumph or a Single Early, depending on who’s doing the categorizing), and ‘Formosa’, a chartreuse lily-flowered tulip, fresh off the Netherlands breeding fields.  Although I’m no authority, it seems unlikely that a late-blooming lily-flowered tulip would have much ancestry in common with  a Triumph, beyond the bare facts of their being tulips. So I didn’t know why they both showed this characteristic.  My first I thought  had been that ‘Couleur Cardinal’ foliage might somehow have taken some of the color of its flowers, an embarrasingly medieval notion.

But Formosa blasted that theory (if it deserves the name of theory) by showing up like this:

(The little tongues coming out of the middle are the flower buds. If your tulips don’t show this, that means you will have no flowers this year – and that you need to split up your bulbs and/or give them a lot of phosphate and possibly calcium.)

As so often happens when you start looking for something, I noticed that the early foliage of Dreaming Maid (a Triumph tulip) had a red tinge, too, at least on some of them:

It isn’t just the new little noses poking out of the ground that are colorful. Older tulip foliage has reds and pinks, too – plus a couple of other things worth taking a look at.  For those of you who haven’t had enough (I may be talking to an audience of one: myself), I’ll take a look at older foliage in the next post.