While nowhere as showy as common bleeding heart, I am hoping the fern leaf white flowers selfseeds as easy as the pink. My friend calls the fern leaf wild bleeding heart.
It's also commonly called squirrel corn (I think they like to eat the tubers)
I've had a similar issue with bleeding heart's close cousin, Dutchman's Breeches. I've always wanted some for our shade garden, but no nursery seems to carry it and no catalog carries it as a plant (and the roots they send when you order never seem to take). Nor have I ever found a wild patch to take a sample from like I did for most of our ferns and Jack-in-the Pulpits (Jacks-in-the Pulpit?)
There was also the case this year of the
Mazus reptans . I managed to get one plant of this at a nursery five or ten years ago, and stuck it on the side of the front yard by the pachysandra, where we needed some groundcover. It grew but very very slowly, and never seemed to really spread like I wanted. It didn't help that I had to literally fence the area off after a few years to keep the gardeners from destroying it (there's some sort of weed around here that looks just like
M. reptans apart from the flowers (which are smaller and have more white) and once the flowers were done you couldn't tell one from the other, so the gardeners kept pulling it ALL out.) But after that one, I NEVER saw it at a nursery again. That is, until this year, when I was walking by a display of groundcovers at Rosedale and saw they had literally FLATS of the stuff, all I could ever want! However as a final ironic twist, this is also the year when my
Mazus decided to get of its proverbial ass and get down to business; we are literally DROWNING in the stuff now. So now that I can get all I want more, I don't actually need any! (plus my original plant is a much nicer cultivar than what they have)
