This week: Spiderworts and all
Hello!
This week, Tradescantia virginiana, or Common Spiderwort, is blooming in my garden. Spiderwort is a throwback plant that your grandparents or great-grandparents may have had in their garden. It grows two to three feet tall and has long, narrow leaves and small purple flowers. If sheered back after flowering, it may re-bloom later in the season. It looks lovely along a border and can cope with many conditions: soggy soil, clay, regular soil, full sun, and even partial shade.
In the right situation, it will form colonies and can be divided every few years to control its spread. This is how I got mine—someone gave a chunk of it to a friend who passed it along to me.
What’s In a Name
Spiderwort suffers from an unappealing common name—it sounds like it should be in a witch’s cauldron, not a pollinator garden. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, plenty of plants have “wort” in the name because it was the Old English term for a plant used for food or medicine. Hence Lungwort, Cutleaf Toothwort, St. John’s Wort, and so on.
Spiderwort was used to treat cancer, insect bites, and kidney problems, to name a few. It was also eaten in salads! (You shouldn’t consume it, though. Apparently, it can cause some of the ailments it treats).
As for the botanic name, if you guessed that there was a British plant collector behind it, you’d be right. John Tradescants the Younger, a royal gardener, collected a bunch of plants, including Spiderwort, Tuliptree, and Phlox, from the Virginia colony in the 1630s for the Crown. The whole genus Tradescantia was named for him by Linnaeus.
Elsewhere:
Margaret Roach digs into the native plant industry in this interview with Neil Diboll of Prairie Nursery. Read the New York Times article (unlocked).
Have a great week,
Julie