A (not so) Charming Volunteer

Yesterday I posted about a charming volunteer plant that mysteriously appeared in my garden one day. Thanks to Nan Ondra at Hayefield, I now know that it is Semiaquilegia ecalcarata.

Another volunteer in my garden is a plant that I call purple Perilla. I'm pretty sure of the botanical name on this one, it's Perilla frutescens. The arrival of this plant in my garden is not a mystery, I asked my friend Chris for a few pieces.

Perilla reminds me of Coleus. It has a lovely leaf and being part of the mint family, it also smells delicious. Since it is not winter hardy here, you'd think that it wouldn't be invasive in your garden.

As you can see from the opening photo, the deep rich purple of Perilla makes it the most amazing companion plant in deep shade, semi shade and even some sunny spots. But wait! It also has nice tall spires of small lavender blue blooms. How charming...uh oh. If you leave those spires on the plant they will scatter a gazillion seeds through out your garden.

Look how sweet they look here coming up by the Hosta. This is the time I need to remind myself that each of these plants can grow to almost a meter (3') tall. Do you think you'll be able to see any of those Hosta then?

Unfortunately I made the mistake of letting these beauties grow and many of the low growing shade plants in my garden suffered that year. Last year I tried hard to be ruthless in pulling out as many as I could find. Just leave a few in the bed, I kept telling myself, further in the back so I could enjoy that marvelous color. Another good idea would be to cut the blooms off but by then it's late summer and early fall and I'm usually off doing some kind of Marching Band thing then.


I no longer need a reminder though about how prolific Perilla can be. All I have to do is look down at my feet to see that they will grow anywhere their tiny seeds hit the ground.

A charming volunteer

Sometimes plants pop up in your garden and you wonder where they came from. Most often it's a weed, sometimes it's a charming wild flower and every now and then it's a total mystery plant.

When we built a garden around the slope on the back of our pool, we had to bring in several truck loads of soil. Instead of getting top soil from a place that sifts and screens the soil, we were able to get it from a perennial farm right up the street.

The soil was mostly compost, there were still pieces of wood chips in it, lots of sand and a quite a few stones. I had to remove the stones by hand but it was still well worth the effort as the soil was free of cost to us.

One day I noticed a little volunteer plant growing in the bed. It had foliage like a Columbine but much smaller than any I had in my gardens.

The plant grew quickly into a nice little clump and then began to bloom. It's been there 3 years now and has self seeded all along that rock wall. My only complaint is that the seedlings do not like to be disturbed or transplanted. I've only had success with one or two that were moved when they were teeny tiny.

Taking a good photo of the blooms has challenged me as my point and shoot digital camera has too wide a focus and so far I haven't gotten it to focus on one individual bloom. Still, I hope you can see how charming this little volunteer is.

Has anybody seen a Columbine similar to this?