Solomon's Seals are a tribe of several dozen hardy woodland perennials, many of which can find happy and attractive homes in every garden, woodlandish or not. I'm embarrassed to admit that, so far, I only have four. Each is a doozy, but still, only four. I'll get to work on this I promise.
Yesterday I introduced the midget of the family, Dwarf Solomon's Seal. (I'm realizing that it must not be P-C to refer to any small-stature plant as "midget" this or that. It's "dwarf" this or that, thank you.)
Here's the next-taller one of my paltry (if high-toned) collection: Striped Solomon's Seal.
Get a load of those leaves! Striped isn't quite the right word, though. The white markings aren't uniformly sized or arrayed. Blotched? Nope, that's not it either. The latin is, for once, really helpful. This is Polygonatum x hybridum 'Striatum'. The leaves are striated: having lots of linear marks (or ridges of grooves) without getting into the details of how similar one mark might be to another. Striation, then, is the liberal version of striped; stripes are the conservatives in the striation family.


In my gardens, at least, I'm the big-tent dictator. As long as you're interesting and energetic, I don't care about your private life or your politics. Stripes as well as striates: Come on in!

Striated Solomon's Seal does tend to put out the occasional all-green stem; just cut any off so the colony maintains its aesthetic purity.  Nonetheless, it's a particularly welcome Seal, in that the leaf color is seriously more showy (if you like that sort of thing) than the next Solomon's Seal we'll look at, the "Variegated" S-S. It just has an oh-so-tasteful white border around the leaves. As we'll see in tomorrow's post.

As I mentioned in "Feisty", the One-Minute Max for May 13, dwarf Solomon's seal doesn't let its lack of height diminish its authority, its territoriality. First, that "height."I understand that really giant dwarf Solomon's seal can soar to five even six inches. Mine is about half that, whether from culture or luck or youth I don't yet know. Maybe this is a dwarf-dwarf clone, or just a young colony (this is its third year).
I love how it seems to crowd up against the edge of the bluestone walkway. It can't creep underground far enough to get to the other side of the walkway (which is even feet wide), which perhaps will only increase the sense of intention and urgency on this side.
As the colony matures, the growth gets dense enough to work as respectable groundcover. And the outward creep continues too; I suppose in a decade I'll have it five feet wider. Given that everything else within radius is many times as tall, that would be just ducky.