Random plant event: Mertensia virginica

The Mertensia virginica across the street from us have survived another family, and another year.

Pretty pictures: Mertensia virginica

Once again, the neighbor across the street from us has a large swath of yard covered in Mertensia virginica. The occupants have changed two or three times since we've lived here, and every time that's happened, I've been worried that the new people might decide to dig it all up. So every spring when the Mertensia blooms again, I feel relieved: they've gotten through another year. And so have I.

Most of the plants are in their heavily-shaded back yard and don't photograph particularly well,¹ but there's another group on the corner under a walnut tree, of all places,² that were willing to pose for me.

In previous years, there have been a couple plants that were blooming pink, and a few more that bloomed white; this year I didn't see any pink ones, but there are several white ones. One kind of prefers the blue anyway,³ but variety is nice.

Really what I should do, I know, is ask them for some of the plants. Or at least seeds. (They seem to be spreading: I assume that means that they're producing viable seeds.) Then I wouldn't have to live in fear that they'd all vanish some year. Though it's possible that the fear is part of why I enjoy them so much.

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¹ Or at least didn't this year; the set of photos I took in 2011 were from the heavy-shade area.
² Walnuts are allelopathic: they produce chemicals (in the case of the black walnut, juglone) that repress the growth of other plants beneath them. Not all plants are affected by juglone, but enough of them are that it's a little surprising to see something as pleasant and ornamental as Mertensia shrugging it off.
³ (You know how one is.)

Pretty pictures: Mertensia virginica

Is it really possible that I've never blogged about Mertensia virginica (Virginia bluebells) before? I just did a search of the blog for "mertensia" and only found one post where I'd mentioned them -- and I didn't even have a picture in that post because it was about tulips.

Which, okay, I realize that I'm only one person, and I can't actually blog about every species of plant I ever run into, but if I really didn't blog about M. virginica until today, I should be punished for it.

[pause]

Maybe just spoken to very harshly. But there should be consequences. No plant this cool should have to wait three and a half years to be featured on a blog. The puzzling part is, I know I saw them last year: I have pictures of last year's saved on my computer. So what happened to those pictures? Why didn't I write up the posts?

Whatever. So here are some more pictures from this year:


All photos in this post are from the yard of our across-the-street neighbor, which is the largest grouping of Mertensia I've seen anywhere in town. I don't remember when the above photo was taken, but below is the same approximate area, yesterday morning:


Mertensia is also prone to produce the occasional off-color sport. I did a little googling about the plant, which gave me the impression that white is the most common color other than blue. The neighbor's yard does have a few white-blooming plants, but unfortunately they're all deep enough into the yard to make it difficult to get a picture from the alley, so I don't have photos of them. There are also a handful of pink flowers, which are easier to get to, and they're pretty cool also:


I really want some of these for our yard, but the husband and I have not yet been able to get a clear plan yet (among other things, there's an extremely heavy shed that needs to, somehow, move from one side of the yard to the other, which pretty much means nothing can be planted near the origin or destination), and I'm not sure but what the yard wouldn't be too sunny for Mertensia anyway. Still, though, I'm going to be watching to see if I can find seeds on the neighbors' plants anyway. The Wikipedia page for M. virginica has a photo of seeds, so I should be able to identify them, and maybe I'll get lucky.