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The best performing of the Vincetoxicum in the garden. It produces its white flowers early in the year and carries on flowering until autumn
making good clumps of herbaceous stems. I got it from Cotswold Garden Flowers and their description says: "Thin heads of small white flowers Jul-Aug, yellow autumn colour, 25cm. Long-lived well-behaved herbaceous perennial. Continental Eurasia." The Missouri Botanical Garden profile says: "Vincetoxicum hirundinaria, commonly called white swallow-wort or pale swallow-wort, is a rhizomatous herbaceous perennial which is native to cliffs, slopes and rocky outcrops in Europe and southwestern Russia. It has escaped gardens and naturalized in parts of New York, Michigan and Ontario. This is an invasive, upright, ultimately twining, vine-like plant that grows to 3-6’ per season. If allowed to naturalize unimpeded by any control measures, it can quickly cover open forested areas, forest margins, grasslands, pastures, slopes and roadways with tangled masses of foliage that shade, suppress growth and sometimes totally choke out nearby native plants in the course of often forming a dense monoculture. This plant has poisonous alkaloids in the roots and is considered to be poisonous to humans and animals. Specific epithet comes from the Latin word hirundo meaning swallow in reference to the purported resemblance of its seedpod to the wing or tail of a swallow." It hasn't yet set seed in my cooler climate and has not presented any problems in the garden. |
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| 20th July 2019 | ||
