A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2007 Help! What is this pretty flowering plant?

Hi, I am a brand new member to this message board, and am so glad I found it as I have been trying to identify this plant since last year. I have only gotten interested in plants and flowers and what their names were in the past couple of years, and would love to know what this plant is that just started coming up in the rock garden beside the house. There aren't any others like this in the whole neighborhood, and I definitely did not plant it there.. it just started coming up last spring all by itself. It had these lovely bright flowers for about 6 weeks last year, and they just started blooming this year. It has at least trippled in size. My son says it's a weed, but I have been calling it "The Mystery plant". The flowers smell very pretty. I have more pictures with closeups of the blooms at my website..(link below). I hope someone here can tell me what it is.
http://eileensattic.homestead.com/plants.html
Thanks!
-Eileen

I'm not an expert but your plant looks very much like the verbenas in my garden.

The leaves on a verbena are different!

I am leaning toward Dianthus...what does everyone else think???

Eileen,
Welcome to The Garden Helper's Forum!!!
So very glad you found us!!!


I believe it's Sweet William

And save those seeds, you'll get a ton of them..
They are also a biennial...
So, you'll get a plant and some foliage and next year flowers,
If it's re~seeding it's self, you'll get both every year...

What fun!!!

You've got a nice clump of them, very healthy looking!!!!


*****Karen,
In the dianthus's family are carnations, pinks and Sweet Williams. So you were correct!!!!!!!!

Weezie

Thank you all so much for the nice welcome, and the answers. My one brother thought maybe it was a primrose, but I couldn't find any of those in my book that looked exactly like it. I only have one flower book and it's not a very good one.. has all kinds of other wildlife in it too.. but it's all I had except for the Internet and the nursery catalogs I've been getting. The book I have doesn't even have a picture of any Sweet Williams.. but it says that it's a plox. Here I always thought phlox were low ground-cover.. the kind you see spilling out of rock gardens.

Weezie, I have already dug up two more little ones that came up this year beside the big plant, and moved them to other flower beds. Does a person trim these back? or how do you keep them from taking over?

I think I'm going to really like this message board!

-Eileen

Eileen,

It depends on your style of gardening how to keep them under control....

If you like plants that reseed, for other parts of your garden, or for trading with people,
then leave the seeds on and either let them be and spring up around in the garden and move them to different places, or cut the seed heads off when they are done drying and save them in a mailing envelope or brown paper bag *go to the seed department and ask, other's may have different ways of saving them* Or just after they are done flowering, cut them back a bit, and they should reflower for you. And seeds will produce on the last set of flowers around fall time.

Weezie

P.S. I am glad you found us too!! We are a very nice group here, and all are very friendly and very knowledgeable...We have a little bit of everything here from the Master Gardener to the Brand New Gardeners. And it's not just a gardening site, there's a whole bunch more, from Recipes, to Crafts, and Hobbies, and Banter Hall to get to know everyone, and there's a Game Room that was quite busy in the winter months when we are starving for things to do..Glad you joined us!

Definetly dianthus or sweet williams. It's a great plant. I have them in shade and in sun - very easy to grow. No pest problems you just need to deadhead and they blooms all season. They do here anyway. Mine will die down at the end of summer and come back when it's cool, like October and bloom again for a while. I haven't found them to be biennial here like the info says. After 2-3 years they just don't come back so I keep reseeding and usually add a few live plants.

Yippie...I actually got another one right!!!
If I keep guessing maybe I will increase my percentage.

I cheated...I just planted a 6 pack out front not to long ago....and those leaves rang a bell....had to go out and look at the tag!!!

This is just so neat! Thank you all for the help, I am thrilled now to know what this is and what to expect from it. Now I wonder how it got started in my rock garden in the first place, 'cause I didn't plant any seeds there, and before what I grew there was Dahlias..(I probably spelled that wrong).
Anyways.. this is a great group. I've been so busy this weekend, but hopefully I'll have more time for browsing all the messages here.
And I do have one more mystery plant.. but I need to get pictures first.
I never knew plants were going to be so much fun!
-Eileen

I know seed spreading can be caused by seeds being eaten by birds and then deposited by means of Pooping...(The Raven's around here help spread palm seeds)....and wind can help spread those seeds.

Anybody else have an answer???

Oh yeah if an animal walks through a plant the seeds can become attached to their fur and then dropped later on! When it rains hard enough the seed can be buried slightly with soil!

Karen,
***and Eileen,
GOD and Mother Nature work wonders together,
don't they??????

I had the same thing happen, and the same color
Phlox. I had originally allllll a light purple color... and one year, another clump by my mom's split rail fence, came up, I reconized it's leaves, and it was HOT PINK when it bloomed,
what an excitement to see that color!

I'd say birds, wind, water, God has a mysterious way of moving things!! *and people*

Can not wait for the new Mystery plant,
we love that catagory..........
who can answer it first :p :p :p

I never thought about the birds actually eating the seeds.. ha-ha! That really was a clever idea God had.

Ok.. I'm looking back on the posts, and Sheri said something about "deadheading"... I'm not sure what that means.. just cut the flowers?
-Eileen