Roses are the typical fare for Valentine’s Day giving, but there are lots of plants and flowers with more romantic names associated with hearts and love.
The first one that comes to mind is bleeding heart. This perennial plant blooms in late spring and has flowers that resemble tiny pink or white hearts with a drop of blood at the bottom of each. Bleeding hearts grow best in light to full shade and by July will go completely dormant, causing many people to believe they have killed their plant.
Love-lies-bleeding is a summer-blooming annual plant with slender tassels of red or gold drooping flowers and blood-red leaves. It grows 3-8 feet tall and is drought tolerant once established. It is a good cut flower and also dries nicely. The leaves and seeds are edible. Not so romantic, loves-lies-bleeding is of the same family as common pigweed.
Love-in-a-mist has soft blue, pink, purple or greenish-white flowers that seem to float above a mist of delicate threadlike foliage. This annual flower is easily grown from seed, germinating in about a week. The flowers are single or double, an inch or two wide, and the plants grow 15-30 inches tall. The flowers are good for bedding or cutting and the seedpods are used in dried floral arrangements.
Love-in-a-puff even has a recognizable “heart” term in its Latin name: Cardiospermum halicacabum. It is also called heartseed and is a fast growing vine that can reach up to 10 feet in one season. The foliage resembles that of tomato plants and it has small insignificant white flowers. It is grown for its seedpods, three-sided green balloons that eventually turn brown. When squeezed, they pop, and there are three seeds inside, each with a perfect white heart at the place where it was attached to the pod. Love-in-a-puff is considered invasive in the south, where the vines grow so thickly that they smother native vegetation.
You may not have heard the term “heart’s ease” but you are certainly familiar with the plant. We know it here as Johnny-Jump-Up. Heart’s ease is a common European wildflower, the progenitor of the cultivated pansy. The plants grow about 7 inches tall and have purple, yellow or white flowers but the prettiest of them have a combination of all three colors. Heart’s ease self-seeds prolifically and will be found growing in unexpected places. It can be pulled easily if it germinates in the wrong spot, but an unplanned clump of the pretty little blossoms can be a nice surprise. The name probably comes for European folk medicine’s use of the plant’s leaf tea for fevers, as a mild sedative, as a blood purifier and for asthma and heart palpitations. Just looking into the happy little flower faces can lower your blood pressure.
Some other romantically named plants are kiss me over the garden gate, forget-me-not, hearts and honey vine, lady’s love, and string of hearts.
Roses are nice for Valentine’s Day, but one of the above plants, or even a packet of seeds tucked into a pretty card, might win your Valentine’s heart.
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