The more moist it is, the longer to dormancy. September is asking a lot!

Really? If I keep watering it everyday in August until september, won't it last until september?

Yes moisture and the deeper the shade the longer the foliage will last, but they will not bloom quite as well in deep shade.

Ok how about extreme heat and humidity even without sunlight?

There is more than one species of bleeding heart. Are you comparing the same kind?

I have both ample moisture and shade. And moderate temperatures. Lamprocapnos spectabilis still don't last until September. It's not in their nature.

wishes and dreams may not change genetic tendencies ...

ken

Mine peter out in July because I don’t baby them. I don’t know if September is possible anywhere...,

I live in a wooded area with a high water table..bleeding hearts should last as long here as anywhere..my neighbors have had them for years..it doesn't seem long after blooming before they yellow and go down..when I finally bought 2 last year on clearance (already yellowing) I planted them in my BACKYARD behind some ferns..didn't want a frontyard location like the neighbors..

Well nevermind then lol this plant is out of my list

Heruga, you are not clear on why you need this plant to appear looking good for so long. Other than some BLE's, very few plants look good all season or longer - they all have their peaks and valleys and herbaceous perennials generally ALL have a shorter season of interest (or looking good) than most other plant types.

What exactly is wrong with allowing it to go dormant on its own sechedule? If you are clever with selection and siting, something else of interest should be drawing one's attention when the bleeding heart starts going over and it should be virtually unnoticeable. This is what good landscape design is all about!

Its not because I'm too lazy or not willing to work around this plant in terms of landscaping. I just don't like how a plant leaves too early when the growing season isn't even over yet. I know this sounds ridiculous but it feels a bit sad when all my other plants are still around but that one plant has to leave first. If the majority of herbaceous perennials have the standard spring to fall active growing season then I expect all my perennials to be the same. Many perennials in my area look perfectly ok until november. At least every perennial I grow except paeonia japonica and convallaria majalis looks good until mid fall. I only have one plant in my list that doesn't have a long active period, which is arisaema heterophyllum, but that plant is just my only one exception because its just so unique. So unless that early dormant perennial has some outstanding characteristics, I simply won't grow it. I'd like to keep my garden as full as possible with every plant still showing at the same time.

Not a fan of ghost lilies, i take it. Lol.

This has to be the weirdest think I’ve ever heard.

Why not just plant evergreens if you can’t handle change????

So you will miss all the magnificent spring ephemerals--trilliums, shooting stars, bellworts, Virginia bluebells, trout lilies etc.--just because they don't hang around all season? You shoot yourself in the foot.

You guys have your preferences and I have mine. I don't think I'm missing out on anything because to me the different bloom times indicate the 'change' and 'something going on every month' that you guys say.. Not plants going dormant. And of course when plants don't bloom in winter I go to the conifers to enjoy. And no it wouldn't look dreary at all because no flowering perennial looks the same all year round... Unless you have a garden with only ferns, mosses and conifers nothing will look the same all year round lol. Why do I need to have early dormant perennials when there are still plenty of long active perennials out there that are equally as beautiful???

Same bed in March, May and August. All the plants leaf out and flower in their seasons and there is no problem with either emerging or dying foliage. Each wave hides the previous one.

Of course you don't have to have early dormant perennials, but without them you are denying yourself huge numbers of beautiful plants which are among the earliest flowers in the garden. Are you really not going to allow yourself that joy? No bulbs at all?

Thats a very nice garden. But for my garden, its not all about the physical looks of it. Well of course I do like the appeal of all the beautiful flowers and foliage and I do choose plants based on its looks to but to me it feels lacking when one plant goes missing while the growing season is still on. Even if they have finished blooming I still would like to have the foliage there and again not because of how the foliage looks nice but because of the mentality that the plant is still there in the garden for me...

I do have some bulbs in my garden and 3 of them are also in my future garden list. These three bulbs stay active for a long time though unlike most other bulbs. I've got lycoris radiata which bloom in august and foliage stays active until following mid-late spring, lilium lancifolium which stays active spring through fall, and allium schonoeprasum which I use for food but they have very nice flowers. They all last all season long. So not all bulbs bloom and die off early in the season.

I do have a lot of bulbs in my current garden right now that are early dormant bulbs that my dad planted years ago.. spring blooming crocuses, a lot of daffodils, some tulips, grape hyacinths. Yes they are stunning when in bloom but they won't be in my future garden once I move out and buy my own property.

This is the weirdest conversation GW has ever had on the garden side....

Yes. The way the garden changes through the season is to me one of its greatest charms.

Indeed, for me, a plant that goes dormant just allows creative plantings on top of it. For me, dicentra spectabilis looks old and tired before it disappears and I'm more than ready for it to depart..usually in June.

We each have our own styles. Heruga prefers a Japanese style garden and his space is limited (suburban lot) so he's making the best choice for him. Milly (above) is being hateful. My dicentra spectabilis is a large clump three feet tall & wide. It looks crummy from late June until mid August. Every summer I think about whacking it back prematurely because it's so big and ugly. It's in a corner knida out of the way so I do my best to ignore it. I understand why Heruga would choose to edit it out and that's his choice.

I kind of like a discussion that debates the merits of seasonally disappearing plants. And Heruga is a young gardener, and who knows how he will feel in 10 years about this issue. My strategies as a gardener have changed considerably over the years.

IME I need to put such plants where the dying foliage will be hidden by other plants. When I first started planting bulbs I didn't think about how they would look in June as the foliage died off, and now I have a number of bulb clumps that need to be dug and shifted to spots farther back in the beds. And like Heugera, I do look for plants that have a long season of interest, although I can't imagine spring without daffodils even if they are one-shot wonders. They extend my relatively short gardening season as a whole, blooming during a time when we can still get snow when little else is blooming other than a few early shrubs and other bulbs.

Hey, whatever floats your boat, Heruga. Not my style or interest in the least, but if it makes your loins quiver...work it!

And to answer your original question, this is highly unlikely unless you look in the florus plasticus family.

Learning to deal the vagaries of the various plants in one's garden is a basic skill for a gardener. WE don't get to decide the 'growing season' - they do. And how they behave at different times of the year is part of their many features. I learned very early on in my career as a gardener that plants do not perform on schedule or necessarily to my wishes. They are living beings that are responding to their own biology. You either accept that requirement for flexibility or choose not to grow them if you just can't put up with what they offer. We have seen similar discussion on here many times, most recently with respect to oriental poppies, whch many choose not to grow because they too start declining rapidly after their bloom season. Heruga and the bleeding hearts are really no different :-)

But I would also encourage young gardeners like Heruga to be much looser in their requirements for their plants and more flexible in their expectations. And that is because it is a very valuable learning experience! Many of us here have been gardening longer than Heruga has been alive and have arrived at the point of gardening proficiency we have simply through an enormous trial and error learning process that touches on all of this. As Babs notes, what we started out doing or planting early in our gardening years has no doubt changed radically as we have gained more plant knowledge and understanding. I know it has in mine!!

Also, Heruga has expressed an interest in landscape or garden design and I would also encourage a lot of experimentation with a wide variety of plant types to that end. A good designer needs to have the skill set to deal effectively with these plant peaks and valleys and that is best accomplished by growing them themselves in a garden setting.....a least on a temporary basis :-) The experience that this engenders will make one better able to deal with client demands and generate satisfactory or even superior results.

So I would encourage Heruga to step out of his comfort zone and narrow requirements for his plant choices and try everything that is of interest (and not just because of Japanese origin or long season of attraction) and LEARN about all different plants and how to combine them. If he chooses not to include them in his own personal garden that is still down the road a few years, so be it, but at least he will have learned a lot in this early period of experimentation and that will only help as he progresses in whatever horticultural career he chooses to pursue.

@cecily - why do you think Milly is being "hateful"? I've not read anything in Milly's comments which would make me think that.

Some posters are often so blunt in their comments as to border on being rude. And it often just involves a better choice of words or a bit more tact :-) And less of a tendency to promote one's self as an authority on pretty much any subject/topic/forum they care to comment on. Opinions are fine and always welcome if they are expressed as opinions (and politely) and not as an absolute or definitive answer. Few - if any - of us are that skilled or knowledgeable!!

Thanks for the advice gardengal. Yes I'm only 23 and I've only been seriously gardening for a year and a half and I know what I've experienced and learned so far is baby level compared to some of you who has been gardening for decades. But I do deal with a variety of plants at my job. Whether they are non Japanese native or early dormant perennials or non deer resistant I still use them for my design. And my whole workplace used to be on top of a mountain so my boss says he wants a lot of natives. So I do experience with different plants like that but when it comes to my own garden I prefer to have plants that adhere to my requirements. But who knows it'll be at least 10 years until I'll be able to buy a home and have my own garden so stuff could change until then. I am trying to let go of my stubborn mind of not letting early dormant perennials in my garden.. Maybe I could have At least one or two of them in my garden. Cardiocrinum cordatum is currently in my head lol

@ La Lennoxa - she used the word weird in both comments and told him to just plant evergreens. Were those remarks kind, thoughtful or helpful to the OP?

Well, I will kinda echo some of the above, though in general. In life, children often will decide that one thing is the best in the world and want to only eat that one thing. As adults, we learn to savor diverse flavors and I hope, most of us have learned to try it before we make a face and say it's Yucky.

Sometimes the new dish is good. Sometimes it's not, but we have to be open to trying it. We may not like it.

In my vocabulary, "weird" is nowhere near "hateful". All posters have the right to express an opinion, and I've certainly seen my share of ones that aren't necessarily kind, thoughtful or helpful - indeed, I may have expressed plenty of those myself, and have been the recipient of same in threads I have posted. But again, for the purposes of this thread in case anyone thinks otherwise, let it be known that this is just my humble opinion.

Yea those comments weren't helpful or pleasant at all.

This is an interesting thread. I respect the OP's unique perspective although I interpret the plants so differently. I like ephemerals - they seem special and magical just popping up for a bit then fading away. Blink and you miss it! Kind of like cherry blooms and very colorful Fall leaves - special and also fleeting. Maybe more special because it is fleeting.

I find it interesting the OP finds bulbs to be impermanent as they can be the few plants that will last on a peice of land for generations - often coming up in areas where the original garden is long gone. That is one of the reasons I plant bulbs. I don't disagree though- they do fade and leave empty spots. I DO get sad when they go.

That said, gardening is about joy and enjoyment. I can understand the OP's thought process- something is "dying" in the midst of what should be a celebration of life. I think it's a visceral reaction for him. He should plant what makes gardening enjoyable to him and not what we say he should enjoy.

If you didn’t grow up gardening, that would explain a lot, taking your age into account.

No plant is static throughout its season. They all look better or worse. The skill in garden design is making the seasons dance. Trying to squash something so changeable into a flat picture is only going to leave you frustrated. Dicentra leaves no hole when properly placed. It blooms, and then it sleeps.

It’s like someone saying they want cats that just sit nicely on a chair and don’t move around so much.

I have a hussy bed. It’s a bed that people walking and driving by see. I cram it full of long-bloomers and ephemerals and a few annuals to get maximum flower impact from March to the end of November. I plant scented things and stuff that brings clouds of dancing butterflies.

But I call it my hussy bed because it’s lovely but also cheap and easy. I take far more delight in my difficult and complicated spaces.

Hey guys I decided to give it a go on arisaema serratum var. mayebarai. Nevermind on arisaema heterophyllum. The arisaema goes dormant I think around august. The black blooms on the arisaema are just too unique to pass!

Actually I suspect the foliage will yellow by July for arisaema, but I agree they're a neat woodland ephemeral. There'sa lot of those.

I grew it once...but it escaped (ie died due to poor drainage).

I took this picture of this dicentra spectabilis today and it looks like it's just started to yellow. Last year this same plant completely died out by the beginning of August. This year it still seems to be going despite 10+ heatwave periods we had so far this year. Anyone know what could cause this.

I wonder if its roots have gone deeper and can better sustain the plant ? Their roots are formidable, in a good way! Can you add something that grows later to shade it? Depending on how much room there is.

I love my dicentra spectabilis , but have moved them to deep shade...the pink blossoms are wonderful in the shade even under mature birch trees and they bloomed for many weeks this summer .

Snow, where are you and was that pic taken recently? The bleeding heart I saw is the residents plant where I work at. It's very shady there.

In the garden mine are pretty much cut back, but I do have one that seeded in on the north side of a building and it is still quite green. It receives a lot of moisture in that spot.

are you in one of the areas that had a long extended cold spring???

just thinking out loud .. sorta .. lol ... if it has a 12 week active period ... if you start that period 2 weeks later... then wouldnt it last 2 weeks longer ???

its an example.. i didnt do the math ...

in my frozen winter ground MI ...BHs come up rather late ... because the soil has to warm thru the whole deep root mass ... so an extended cold spring delays it all ... [as compared to things that are much shallower rooted ...]

ken

Heruga, I took the picture yesterday. I’m in Anchorage Alaska, we have cool, moist summers allowing the bleeding heart stay green, but only in shade. I’m glad your bleeding heart at work is staying fresher this year...

when I moved mine last fall to the area under birch trees, the roots were enormous and didn’t skip a beat coming up beautifully this spring, and were less floppy in the deep shade.

Oh yes.. I forgot. We did suffer a terrible spring. Snow persisted until the second week of April and temperatures really didn't warm up until May. That is probably why then. And on top of that we had a very very rainy summer(still rainy needless to say) so maybe delayed dormany break+excessive moisture is allowing the bleeding hearts to stay. At least in my area. Snow, since your all the way in Alaska it makes sense the bleeding hearts still persist. I think bleeding hearts don't go dormant until frost in extreme northern areas.

Heruga, you’re right about northern climates... in a ‘good’ summer they sometimes do go dormant. I posted to offer up my theory about the root having matured, but Ken and your theories about the cool spring makes a lot of sense. We had a cool spring too, and are making up for it with lovely sunny weather now, fingers crossed!

I wonder if you’d give the bleeding heart where you work a companion or two? Do you do the gardening there (sorry, I didn’t read the whole thread). I’m enjoying astilbe immensely right now, and have recently learned to love brunnera. Shade plants look so tidy.

Heruga, have you tried any of the golden foliage bleeding hearts? In my garden the Gold Heart, and White Gold varieties, typically stick around nicely the whole season.

Snow, yes I do help residents do gardening pretty often but the bleeding heart was already there. Shade plants would be nice if there is actually shade without maples!

This is the first time I've heard of a golden foliaged bleeding heart. I may look into it. Though typically I am not a big fan of any golden foliaged plants.

Heruga, You’re nice to help the residents, they must appreciate that! I purchased 3 more dicentra ‘alba’ this year, they have lovely pure white flowers. I also love the dicentra ‘valentine’ on which the flowers tend toward red rather than the clear pink. All are lovely! I have a golden foliage one, very pretty but it catches my eye, making me feel like it’s fall all summer long. (Our main fall color is gold).

My problem isn’t that the dicentra turn brown (due to my cool climate, they stay green), rather they get terribly floppy and that’s why I’m moving them to deeper shade, we don’t have maples but lots of birch.

i like calling them lady’s locket, doubt I’ll ever get used to lamprocapnos

Still around now even though we had a super early spring this year. Why some years they go dormant early and some years not?

Moisture and temperature.