Garden Plants

Strictly speaking, I have only two plants in my garden that I could actually classify as finds, but everything else that grows came to my garden for free anyway. And I'm pretty proud of that because I don't have green fingers.





I literally saved this pretty yellow rose from death, when I found it pulled roughly from the ground, but with roots still on it, in the bushes behind my apartment building. It was during the renovation period of the block, when I was living in a temporary place one street away, but I would come back to my garden daily to feed the stray cats. It was no more than a long stick with some leaves at the top, but two years on it looks like this!

Digging out plants in the wild is a great way to bring variety and color to your garden without cost. They disappear in winter, but most of them grow back the next year, spreading out and getting bigger year after year. They attract all sorts of insects and often nice ones like butterflies or bumblebees. But I never take a lonely plant. I only dig out plants that I see in abundancy so I can single out a small specimen without doing any damage to nature.

Though I took this one from the 'wild zone' in our local park, I've seen it in many people's yards and front-window gardens. Don't know if shops sell it, nor what it's called. Anybody?

PS: What's a front-window garden? If your house fronts directly to the street (about everywhere in the old city) you're allowed to take away a line of tiles from the pavement under your front window and turn it into a mini-garden.



I don't know if this really is a 'wild rose' (or if such a thing actually exists), but we found it growing spontaneously in the nomansland between the city edge and the industrial zone. It was enormous and growing against a tree. It was easy to separate a few shoots and cut off a ca 10 cm piece of the root stick without damaging the mother plant. To me it looks like a tea rose, at least it has the exact same color and form als Jenns tea rose, but the leaves are smaller. By the way, later on I found out you can just cut off a branch, put it in water and it will grow roots. If you live in Amsterdam and want to try it, contact me.

You can find ferns in any forest or area with lots of trees and are a great way to fill up the darker corners of your garden.

I hated the temporary apartment, but the garden was quite nice. I was literally filled with this yellow flowered bush, that I also cannot name, and when we left I just dug out one little shoot and replanted it at home. This is two years old now and in full flower for the first time (this part of the garden was totally ruined by the renovation, so I had to start from scratch).

This one too came from the temporary place, by accident really. I made a bouquet once of the yellow flowers, and decided to fill it up with some branches of this bush. But lazy as I am, I left the dried out bouquet in the vase for weeks, but then the green branches started to grow roots. Also this one is just two years old. So you know now, if you know someone with a bush like this or find them even in a bouquet, it's easy to grow a new plant from it.

That's it for now. I still have the other 'find' to show, phloxes my boyfriend picked up in the trash of the garden shop, but they're not flowering yet. Later!