Bleeding heart\u2014Lamprocapnos spectabilis–has shed seeds, if not blood, all over my garden.\u00a0 I probably planted the first one deliberately ten years ago, though I have no memory of doing so.\u00a0 Now, they are everywhere.\u00a0 Normally those words would constitute the start of a rant about garden thuggery.\u00a0 In this case, however, I have no complaint.\u00a0 The bleeding hearts are a perfect addition to my mostly-blue spring garden.\u00a0 The rosy \u201chearts\u201d 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.\u00a0 Garden visitors sing the praises of the total effect, which is always good for morale.<\/p>\n
Often described as an \u201cold fashioned\u201d plant, the common bleeding heart arrived in Europe from Asia in 1816.\u00a0 It continued on to America and quickly won gardeners\u2019 hearts for its ease of culture and willingness to flourish in partial shade.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Graceful, arching stems draw your eyes up and away from the declining foliage of spring-flowering bulbs.\u00a0 The little dangling \u201chearts,\u201d with their tremulous droplets of white \u201cblood\u201d have delighted children and adults forever.\u00a0 After the blooms have faded, the attractive, lobed foliage lingers for about a month before subsiding gracefully until the following spring.\u00a0 Bleeding heart steps aside at just the right time to allow the summer plants to flourish in its place.\u00a0 Like a good actor, it makes a stunning entrance and exits at just the right moment, earning a solid round of grateful applause.\u00a0 These qualities have not gone unnoticed.\u00a0 The Royal Horticultural Society awarded Lamprocapnos spectabilis its Award of Garden Merit for overall garden performance.<\/p>\n
Those award-winning hearts are actually a couple of swollen petals.\u00a0 Each flower has two additional petals that are smaller and fused together, forming the white protrusions at the bottom of each flower.\u00a0 Fanciful types have long turned the flowers upside down, seeing the white petals as a woman in a puffy red skirt.\u00a0 In the imaginations of some other onlookers, the skirt becomes a bathtub, giving rise to another bleeding heart nickname, \u201clady in the bath.\u201d<\/p>\n
Common names generally coexist happily in the minds of plant lovers, but consternation arose among bleeding heart fanciers when plant taxonomists altered bleeding heart\u2019s Latin name. \u00a0Once 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.\u00a0 Well known New World cousins of common bleeding heart include a wildflower, Dutchman\u2019s breeches or Dicentra cucullaria, and fringed bleeding heart, or Dicentra eximia.\u00a0 Ideas about world harmony and d\u00e9tente 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.\u00a0 Retailers, who are in business to sell plants rather than confusing customers, still refer to traditional bleeding heart as Dicentra spectabilis.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Still, there are some interesting varieties on the market.\u00a0 \u2018Gold Heart\u2019 features the same rosy hearts, but also bears golden-green foliage, a great lightener of dark spaces.\u00a0 \u2018Alba\u2019 is a white-flowered variety, with the same arching, dark green foliage as the species.<\/p>\n
Breeders, especially in Japan, have come up with some interesting hybrids of fringed bleeding heart, including \u2018Burning Hearts\u2019, with red flowers thinly edged in white and \u2018Ivory Hearts\u2019, a white-flowered variety.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The leaves are gray-green and often persist longer than those of common bleeding heart.\u00a0 Those leaves are perfect for covering the multitude of sins\u2014fading foliage, burgeoning weeds, bits of leftover winter debris\u2014that crop up in the spring garden.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 They have the same arching growth habit as Solomon\u2019s seal or Polygonatum, as well as a similar size\u2014topping out at about three feet tall by two feet wide\u2014and might be intermingled in the middle of a shady border.<\/p>\n
If bleeding heart hemorrhages in your garden, don\u2019t despair.\u00a0 Extras are easy to grub out and either compost or give away.\u00a0 There are worse things, after all, than having an excess of heart.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bleeding heart\u2014Lamprocapnos spectabilis–has shed seeds, if not blood, all over my garden.\u00a0 I probably planted the first one deliberately ten years ago, though I have no memory of doing so.\u00a0 Now, they are everywhere.\u00a0 Normally those words would constitute the start of a rant about garden thuggery.\u00a0 In this case, however, I have no complaint.\u00a0 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2],"tags":[402,1180,1182,1179,448,345,126,1181,1183],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","tag-bleeding-heart","tag-dicentra","tag-flowering-perennials","tag-lamprocapnos","tag-native-plants","tag-shade-gardening","tag-shade-plants","tag-spring-flowering-plants","tag-woodland-gardens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1341,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions\/1341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}