DryStoneGarden

This week saw the first flower from a native I’ve been growing for three years, Yerba Mansa, Anemopsis californica. I feel like I rarely see it planted, no doubt because it’s a runner and it likes water, but it’s a nice little plant. We have ours in a container with the drain plugged. Sometimes it gets a lot of water, sometimes it gets a lot of neglect, which is probably why it took three years to bloom. Despite drying out at times, it has increased in size pretty steadily in the time that we’ve had it, growing from a single 4″ pot to fill a ten gallon sized container.

I was so happy to see it bloom that I took a picture of the bud too. Kind of a nice little flower bud, and I definitely like the flower, which develops red spots as it ages. Mature plantings seem to be full of flowers, so I’m expecting ours to be more prolific in the future. We’ll see. The plant was/is collected by Native Americans and is popular with herbalists — it’s often compared to Goldenseal — and I’ve seen tinctures of it for sale. We now have enough to start harvesting, but we give ours water from our turtle tank which makes me a little hesitant to ingest it. Below are some photos I took at Tilden when the plant first caught my interest. (more…)