Dicentra scandens
- To: medit-plants@ucdavis.edu
- Subject: Dicentra scandens
- From: t*@eddy.u%2Dnet.com (Tim Longville)
- Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 16:59:50 GMT
Just to agree with everything Jane says and simply to underline that
left to itself, in suitable conditions, it makes a huge and rampant
mass - very showy (from the sheer quantity of blossom) when in flower
but certainly neither tidy in growth nor generally well-behaved. Here,
in the ground, it happily covered a wall 15'x15'- and showed no sign
of stopping at that. So eventually I dug it up and confined it to a
container (aka an old plastic bucket). It's lived there happily,
entirely unwatered and unfed, for several years - and STILL makes
12'x12'. You would need one heck of a big shrub to grow it through -
and one heck of a strong one to survive the accumulated weight of its
growth over several years. Although, as Jane says, it flowers for much
of the season, in this garden its main burst is around now: for the
past several weeks and for another fortnight or so more the foliage
has been and will be almost invisible under blossom. You'll gather
from the tone of this note that I have mixed feelings about it: to
grow it well you need to give it space and then you begin to think (at
least, I do) Why am I giving this space to a giant exotic groundsel,
ie, to a (can I use the word?) weed? Then it does what it's doing now
and I forgive it for another year. But....
Tim
Tim Longville
