YORKTON - Imagine a lovely swooping stem of foliage, lined with a row of evenly spaced little white bell-shaped flowers, suspended like dainty earrings.
This beautiful plant is a perennial, and it can grow very well in our climate. It is called “Solomon’s Seal”. The official name of this plant, if you want to challenge yourself to remember it, is called “polygonatum”, which describes the look of the bumpy rhizome of the plant. I have also read that the roots, when cut, look like Hebrew letters, (as well as the stems when the leaves fall off) so perhaps it is a nod to King Solomon, known in the Bible for his great wisdom.
Whatever name we choose to call it, it is a beautiful perennial, a cousin of the lily family, and a great addition to the garden. The plant grows from rhizomes, and each rhizome has one stem. Before you think that the plant will look sparse in the garden, fear not, because the plant is very eager to spread rhizomes into an ever-larger clump. The stems are twelve to eighteen inches high, on average.
Solomon’s Seal like an area of the garden that is partial to full shade, with rich and well-drained soil. They like to be evenly moist, but not with wet feet. When the leaves fall off in the fall, let them be. This is one occasion where the super-tidy gardener should leave fallen leaves around the plant, because it will love that organic matter creating a rich mulch around it.
But guess what, I read also that it can grow in shady area that are dry, and this is no easy feat for a lot of perennials. And for country gardeners, this plant is supposedly not a favourite of deer, so your country landscaping would remain intact!
We can plant or divide Solomon’s Seal in either spring or fall, it’s not fussy. And unlike many perennials, it does not suffer if a clump is allowed to grow into a dense patch. If we have a clump that we want to divide or share, just dig part of it up, slice some off, and re-plant it. Doesn’t get much easier than that! We should plant the rhizomes a few inches deep, and make sure that we water them well until they get settled in. After that, they are quite carefree, with no real pest issues.
The plant is beautiful, with arching stems and those lovely little dangling flowers in the spring; even when the flowers are done, the stems are lovely, very architectural with their great shape. I have read that there are also variegated Solomon’s Seal, and the pictures of them look just beautiful.
If you have the space or conditions to create a “woodland garden”, Solomon’s Seal would be one of your first plant choices, along with other foliage shade-lovers like ferns.
I have read that Solomon’s Seal can be grown from seed. For gardeners who don’t mind giving up time they will never get back, Solomon’s Seal seeds can be collected and planted. It will take years to see the results of this effort. And it is hardly even done because it is so easy to propagate the plant from a rhizome cutting. So to sum up, go the easy route for fine success with propagating this plant, and don’t worry about trying to do it from seed!
Add this plant to your “must have” list of plants for a shady area of the garden; it will not disappoint! Visit the Yorkton hort society at www.yorktonhort.ca for news, tips and photos. Thank you to our friends at YTW for their great work each week. Gardeners, have a good week in the garden!
National Garden Day is June 18—take a cuppa coffee out there and savor the garden!
