calling all gardeners
Do you know this plant? I happened on this preposterous plant for the first time ever just this week. Someone had planted several along their boulevard. There was a grouping of about a dozen plants, all about 8 feet tall and now mostly stripped bare of their cold intolerant non-native leaves, so that just these magenta colored flowers were bobbing and weaving in the September sun at the ends of their absurdly thin stems and branches. I was so mesmerized by the site, that I made Steve go see the spectacle a day later. And then, because the Twin Cities is really just a big small town, it turn out that the owner of the flower patch was getting her mail, and she was…a tax client of Steve’s. And permission was granted to take a couple stems. I know many of you are gardeners. I’m curious, are you familiar with kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate? I think it might win for best colloquial name ever.
kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate (Persicaria orientalis)
Aren’t they just gorgeous!? And I love its charming common name :) I consider persicaria to be a somewhat unused old-fashioned flower that seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity. I have never grown it, and didn’t know it got that tall! Surely you have its weedy little relative growing on your land, the one called smartweed/knotweed, less than a foot tall?
How fortunate that the gardener turned out to be one of Steve’s clients (and you didn’t have to acquire the stems surreptitiously, heh heh).