I think it’s time we start showing what native annuals we have to offer, now that native plants are on people’s radars. Ask, and I shall deliver. This one is so cool, with its blue green leaves and bright pink and yellow flowers. Pansies, step aside!
Actually, pansies are one of the plants I did not grow up with in the garden. I was raised in a traditionally-horticultural family that valued gardening. I have early childhood memories of visiting giant nurseries and riding around in the garden carts while my parents looked at shrubs and trees. But pansies… my father put his foot down on that one. Turns out, pansies grow wild at the cemetery where his grandparents (and now parents) are interred in Poland, just a block away from his childhood home. Would that make those new bio-engineered glow-in-the-dark MONSANTOrosities “ghost flowers?” Just a thought…Â
This is a very easy plant to grow and collect seed once you get it established in your garden. I know some people have had mixed results with it in the past, but all these plants are ones that reseeded from mine last year. I’m just offering a few to start, see how they do. If these do well in the shop, I’ll continue to offer them going forward.
Many sites will suggest that the rock harlequin is a biennial. When I grew it from seed last year, it behaved like an annual – grew quickly, set seed, and that was it. It will not reseed easily into mulched areas. However, any spot where you have bare soil, they’ll have it covered in seedlings the following year. You can easily get a nice seed bed going of these unusual flowers within a year or two. It’s not just personal experience – I know others who have also had success with them reseeding. You can also collect seed from them and winter sow into pots so you can be pickier about where they go. That being said, I would not mind these popping up as weeds!
It could behave like a biennial if the seed germinates later in the season and goes dormant before it blooms. I will need to experiment and see if sowing in succession can help to extend the flowering period. Overwintered biennials would bloom earlier than plants which germinated that year.
I have them growing and re-seeding in my native container fairy garden, which I wrote about in the following post. You can also check out this and other fairy garden plants in my MagiK Picks category Flowers for Fae.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.