First I am not trying to argue. Second I have seen your gardens in the uk and they are gorgeous. Just stunning!! To me heirloom is of course a tried and true. Which means open pollination, which simply means that the item in question needs to be pollinated by insects or other means like someone hand pollinating it. Tried and true for generations to me means that it is grown from seed and tried over and over again and it still comes true while being open pollinated unless it is crossed. Melons or Curcurbit can cross within half a mile. Beans and peas do not cross. Tomatoes excluding hybrids potato leaf and currant will not cross. This simply means that if a plant is open pollinated and it is tried and true. That to me means that it produces TRUE seed. Heirloom, tried and true!! In regards to an apple tree, most actually have to have 2 types of apples in order to produce fruit. Now if you are going to try and gather seed you can't very well gather seed without an apple. If natives did not come TRUE from seed regardless if it is a bush, shrub or a flower. Then how do they reseed out in the wild?? 1 criteria of winter sowing is if it reseeds then you can winter sow it. Callicarpa americana is a native. Native means that it is distributed in its area by means of wind or birds or human distribution. Euonymus americanus is another native. Both are shrubs and both come true from seed. IF they are not crossed. Now granted if I was to have 3 types of callicarpa they would not come true from seed, and the ONLY option would then be to propagate from cuttings to get a true plant. Hybrids, the only way to propagate a hybrid is to propagate from cuttings. Some say that if a hybrid sets seed then you can grow it. It is possible in 3 years of saving the seed after 3 generations you may get a stable strain. That to me is not worth it. So I don't mess with hybrids. PawPaw is a native tree that produces fruit, which produces seed, which is true. Mulberry is a tree that produces fruit that produces true seed. There are a lot of fruit trees that actually produce true seed, there are a lot of shrubs that produce true seed. What you have to be aware of is simply: Is there anything that it may have crossed with?? Is it a hybrid?? If people learned botanical names instead the description then this would make seed saving a heck of a lot easier in my opinion. The botanical tells you a lot. Just because you can grow it from seed doesn't mean it will produce true seed. That is why heirlooms are sought is because they DO produce true seed if not crossed. Here is my favorite website on seed saving!! Here is a link that might be useful: Seed Saving

jengledc - Sorry, I just saw your post. We planted Hypericum calycinum in our small our front yard 26 years ago under a then very small Amelanchier canadensis with a few azaleas and native rhodos & added some daffodil bulbs. The rhodos never did anything. The others have all done fine. However, I would be very careful with the Hypericum since it does spread, enough that for awhile I considered trying to pull it all out. We did from one smaller bed & were able to get rid of it. However, the remaining section appears to be pretty much behaving itself (though slowly creeping over to our neighbor's--who hasn't complained). It is pretty most of the year & has received NO care during the entire time except to cut the dead twigs back in the coldest winters & pulling the few weeds that come up through it. You may well live nearby & are welcome to come & see (& even take some) if you want.

It is not invasive in the ecological sense of the word but it was quite thuggish in my former garden. Reseeded quite freely and somewhat resistant to easy removal :-) If you are interested in a St John's wort, I'd suggest the 'Mystical' series, a group of cultivars of Hypericum x inodorum that are grown specifically for their very brightly and distinctly colored berries - blush pink, slamon coral, orange, red and even black. These are considered quite desirable for cut flower arrangements and the hybrids are very rust resistant, a problem that plagues most other SJW's. Not likely to be nearly as thuggish re: reseeding, either.

I harvested seeds from my next door neighbor's St. John's wort many years ago, winter sowed them and planted the seedlings either side of my front door step back around 2009 or so. They come back every year, do their thing and die back in our severe New England winters. Generally it takes a few seasons to judge how various plants/shrubs adapt to growing in your garden. I winter sowed butterfly bush seeds, Buddleia 'Black Knight' as well. All the plants are growing in my various garden beds and seem to perform similarly. In my experience, letting perennials and shrubs do their own thing seems to be all that needs be said when it comes to gardening & garden plant performance. The plants know what to do, so I let them.