A living alternative to bare earth and mulch. Ground covers spread low and wide to carpet the soil, knitting a garden together at its feet while smothering weeds, holding moisture, and binding the ground against erosion.
This plant is a botanical time machine. Sarcandra glabra belongs to the Chloranthaceae, a flowering-plant family with only four surviving genera worldwide and a fossil record reaching back into the Early Cretaceous, more than a hundred million years ago. Pollen and floral fossils of the Chloranthaceae are among the earliest evidence of flowering plants anywhere on Earth, and the family was already abundant when the dinosaurs were only in their middle age. Today Sarcandra is one of just four genera left from a lineage that once spread across what is now Portugal, Spain, and eastern North America, and most of that Cretaceous diversity is gone. The little plant in the garden is a quiet survivor of a family that mostly did not make it.
A spring-blooming native of the eastern woodlands, found from Ontario and Quebec south through the Appalachians and as far west as Minnesota and Oklahoma, growing on rich deciduous forest floors, along streambanks, and at the bases of sandstone canyons. Polemonium reptans is one of those native plants that rewards close attention. The leaves are pinnately compound, with seven to twenty-one paired leaflets running up each stem like the rungs of a ladder, the source of the common name, which gestures all the way back to the biblical Jacob and his dream of a stairway to heaven. The genus name is older still: Polemonium honors King Polemon of Pontus, an ancient Greek ruler with a side interest in herbalism.
Hardiness
Zones 3–8
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
Blue
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, detoxification & cleansing, topical applications, general wellness
Peacock moss is not a moss at all but a very low, spreading fern relative, a spikemoss whose scale-like leaves clothe trailing stems that root as they run and knit into patches across moist, shaded ground. The great distinction of Selaginella uncinata is color: in good light the foliage takes on an iridescent, metallic blue-green sheen, the peacock shimmer that gives the plant a common name.
John Bartram collected Xanthorhiza simplicissima from the Carolina mountains sometime before 1776 and brought the plant back to his famous Philadelphia garden, which tells you two things: that yellowroot has been in cultivation for as long as this country has existed, and that people who know plants have always recognized something worth paying attention to here. The Cherokee had known the plant far longer, using the roots, sliced open to reveal a vivid, almost electric chrome yellow, as a dye, a bitter tonic, and a medicine for ailments from mouth sores to stomach complaints. The active compound is berberine, the same antimicrobial alkaloid found in goldenseal, and the roots produce berberine in striking quantity. Xanthorhiza is Greek for yellow root, and the name is no metaphor.
