Re: Dicentra scandens
Sean
I've had D. scandens growing here for the last four years and it's
one of my favourites, flowering in late May after it reappears in
April and continuing right through to December. I grow it in the
sunniest and driest spot I have , on the outside of the conservatory---
on a wall 4 ft high and 8 ft long, where it attaches itself to 4
wires strung left to right. This would not be the position
recommended in any books I have , which usually suggest growing it
through an open shrub, but it is extremely happy and effective in
this spot, despite its normal height of 15 ft! .At the moment it has
literally thousands of individual yellow lockets made up in clusters
of around ten to twenty. Although I see that Harkness Seedlist, like
B&T Seeds, states that the flowers have a pink tip, I've never seen
this on my own plant and Helen Dillon in her book 'The Flower Garden'
has a photograph of it with the usual greenish tip.
On germination , Helen comments that ' the plant sets copious seed
every year that seems hard to germinate' . However she adds that
cuttings of the wiry stems root easily in early autumn.According to
Norm Deno in 'Seed Germination , Theory and Practice', dry storage of
Dicentra seed is either fatal or severely deleterious and he found
that D. scandens seed germinated well on being moved to 70F after
three months at 40F. This would presumably be in keeping with its
places of origin , Himalayas / Nepal / China, with seed ripening late in
the year and germinating in the spring. I grew my original plant
from seed sown at 40F and moved to 70 F and got 100% germination
but when I retried seed of the same batch six months later, only one
seed germinated out of 50+ sown.
Seed looks like it will ripen this year from late September on.
Pollination here is by bumble bees which can be heard on the
flowers from early morning till dusk, but some of the seedpods are
destroyed by large snails which hide between plant and wall. I've
offered seed to individuals on the Ephemeral Seed Exchange of Alpine -L
but I should still have sufficient to send you some, molluscs
permitting.
Jane,
Rep of Ireland
