Valentine hearts for the garden
Valentine’s Day is fast approaching — a time when giving flowers to loved ones is a wildly popular tradition.
If your loved one happens to be a gardener, you’re in luck, as they typically are the easiest to please. So think about giving to them live plants, especially those that dazzle and dangle at very low cost with an interesting tale to tell in the garden.
The bleeding heart plant (Lamprocapnos spectabilis) perfectly fits this description, and here’s why. This flowering perennial is an old garden favorite immortalized for its nodding, puffy, heart-shaped flowers with protruding white inner petals. The flowers hang down beneath elegantly arched stems — that’s significant dangle in the plant world.
So how did the plant acquire the common name of “bleeding heart?” Well, that inner petal as it extends from each heart-shaped flower casts the impression of hanging blood droplets. This extension is easy to view as the plant blooms, before the attractive leaves emerge.
The heart-shaped portion of the flower ranges in color from deep pink and crimson red to creamy white. The pink and red provide more contrast, but the white flowers resemble icicles refusing to melt with the arrival of spring. No wonder the specific epithet in this plant’s botanical name means “spectacular.”
Although the bleeding heart is not native to Shepherdstown, it thrives along the Potomac River, preferably in the shady conditions of woodland gardens. Being a late spring bloomer, don’t expect this plant to showcase on Feb. 14. But that special someone of yours will soon be planting it, come early spring, among other shade-loving plants, such as hosta, astilbe, hellebore and ferns.
As summer’s heat and humidity approaches, the bleeding heart goes dormant. The foliage may even fade and decompose after the blooming season has ended. But, if well sited, the developing foliage of the surrounding plants or rock ledges conveniently obscure these fading leaves, once lovely-shaped and tinted bluish-green. The gardener can easily clip and mulch these dead stems right back in the flowerbed, where they’ll nourish the soil.
Once established, the bleeding heart will gently self-seed if living conditions are suitable, i.e., humus soil, good drainage and partial shade. This plant is also propagated through root cuttings.
Hummingbirds are primary pollinators for the bleeding heart, as the flowers are a rich source of nectar. Deer and rabbits thankfully don’t seem attracted to the foliage. Ants play an important role in seed dispersal. In return, the fleshy part of the seed provides food for the ants and their young.
This showy ornamental plant will never break the home gardener’s heart. Requiring little to no maintenance, the bleeding heart dependably returns, year-after-year, to perform a ballet dance of hearts in the spring breeze.
Kristi Hendricks is a graduate of Shepherd College and West Virginia University and a Master Gardener with the Virginia Cooperative Extension. She can be reached at belowthejames@yahoo.com.