Bleeding heart—Lamprocapnos spectabilis–has shed seeds, if not blood, all over my garden. I probably planted the first one deliberately ten years ago, though I have no memory of doing so. Now, they are everywhere. Normally those words would constitute the start of a rant about garden thuggery. In this case, however, I have no complaint. The bleeding hearts are a perfect addition to my mostly-blue spring garden. The rosy “hearts” attract bumblebees and other pollinators and have just the slightest blue cast, which makes the plants a great foil for their garden companions–ajuga, forget-me-nots, violets and blue columbines. Garden visitors sing the praises of the total effect, which is always good for morale.
Often described as an “old fashioned” plant, the common bleeding heart arrived in Europe from Asia in 1816. It continued on to America and quickly won gardeners’ hearts for its ease of culture and willingness to flourish in partial shade. For those who want to forestall the inevitable garden let-down during the colorless days between the last tulips and the first iris, bleeding heart is a godsend. Graceful, arching stems draw your eyes up and away from the declining foliage of spring-flowering bulbs. The little dangling “hearts,” with their tremulous droplets of white “blood” have delighted children and adults forever. After the blooms have faded, the attractive, lobed foliage lingers for about a month before subsiding gracefully until the following spring. Bleeding heart steps aside at just the right time to allow the summer plants to flourish in its place. Like a good actor, it makes a stunning entrance and exits at just the right moment, earning a solid round of grateful applause. These qualities have not gone unnoticed. The Royal Horticultural Society awarded Lamprocapnos spectabilis its Award of Garden Merit for overall garden performance.
Those award-winning hearts are actually a couple of swollen petals. Each flower has two additional petals that are smaller and fused together, forming the white protrusions at the bottom of each flower. Fanciful types have long turned the flowers upside down, seeing the white petals as a woman in a puffy red skirt. In the imaginations of some other onlookers, the skirt becomes a bathtub, giving rise to another bleeding heart nickname, “lady in the bath.”
Common names generally coexist happily in the minds of plant lovers, but consternation arose among bleeding heart fanciers when plant taxonomists altered bleeding heart’s Latin name. Once known to the botanical world as Dicentra spectabilis, common bleeding heart is one of a number of related plants that occur naturally in both Asia and North America. Well known New World cousins of common bleeding heart include a wildflower, Dutchman’s breeches or Dicentra cucullaria, and fringed bleeding heart, or Dicentra eximia. Ideas about world harmony and détente do not sway taxonomists, who decided at least a decade ago that Asian bleeding hearts should be separated from their North American kin and placed in a new genus with the unharmonious name Lamprocapnos. Retailers, who are in business to sell plants rather than confusing customers, still refer to traditional bleeding heart as Dicentra spectabilis.
Whether you call it Lamprocapnos or Dicentra, traditional spectabilis species of bleeding heart have not caught the fancy of hybridizers in the way of other flowering plants like echinacea or tickseed. Still, there are some interesting varieties on the market. ‘Gold Heart’ features the same rosy hearts, but also bears golden-green foliage, a great lightener of dark spaces. ‘Alba’ is a white-flowered variety, with the same arching, dark green foliage as the species.
Breeders, especially in Japan, have come up with some interesting hybrids of fringed bleeding heart, including ‘Burning Hearts’, with red flowers thinly edged in white and ‘Ivory Hearts’, a white-flowered variety. The eximia hybrids tend to be a bit more compact than spectabilis varieties and feature the more deeply dissected, almost ferny foliage characteristic of their fringed parents. The leaves are gray-green and often persist longer than those of common bleeding heart. Those leaves are perfect for covering the multitude of sins—fading foliage, burgeoning weeds, bits of leftover winter debris—that crop up in the spring garden.
Bleeding hearts, whether common, fringed or inter-species hybrids, like cool spring conditions including partial shade and consistently moist soil. They coexist nicely with almost everything else that blooms at the same time, including bluebells or Hyacinthoides, pulmonaria lily-of-the-valley and camassia. They have the same arching growth habit as Solomon’s seal or Polygonatum, as well as a similar size—topping out at about three feet tall by two feet wide—and might be intermingled in the middle of a shady border.
If bleeding heart hemorrhages in your garden, don’t despair. Extras are easy to grub out and either compost or give away. There are worse things, after all, than having an excess of heart.