Wood Anemones

Sometimes you get a good reputation unintentionally and without much effort.

Whenever the leaves have fallen from the flowers in the forest in front of my door in mid-October and when a soft rain has moistened these fallen leaves, I go out with my wheelbarrow, which I have equipped with a primitive but functional structure, to rake leaves. And since I’m an obedient nature lover, I only rake on the forest paths.

“I think it’s nice that you rake the paths so nicely,” an older gentleman recently told me, “it’s so rare to find something like that these days.” I felt compelled to clarify the matter; But since I would have had to go into a lot of detail, my explanation was quite short and, on top of that, probably quite incomprehensible. I was also very flattered that I leaned on my rake, looked at the clean paths and admired myself.

Well, I have to finally set the record straight. Maybe that older gentleman will read this story by chance and then he will understand why I did such a philanthropic work and continue to do it every year: out of pure self-interest. I collect gold. Gold for my garden, for the rhododendrons, for snowdrops and March cups, for everything, but especially for my wood anemones.

This love for the small anemones, as they are also called here in northern Germany, is soon even older than my passion for ferns. I still remember clearly the Easter trip when I was seven, which literally had a double whammy, firstly because it was raining unusually heavy and penetrating even for coastal conditions and secondly because not a single wood anemone had yet bloomed in our anemone forest. And that’s why we actually went there in the first place. Every year we went there by bike at the beginning of April because we knew a place where the wood anemones always came a fortnight earlier than usual. Maybe the ground was so warm there or the place was so sheltered, we thought. I only realized that it was a special type of wood anemone that always blooms earlier and in every place when I had some of them from several locations in my garden.

Once I got the hang of it and by chance found a form that came a full four weeks later than this early type, I started looking a little more systematically.

People who are dedicated to domestic orchids live in constant conflict with their conscience and with the law. With a few exceptions, anemone collectors can usually enjoy their hobby without such baggage, but especially if they collect wood anemones.

You mean there’s nothing to collect, apart from the aforementioned different flowering times, they’re all basically the same?

Walk with your eyes open through an anemone forest, or through several forests and especially to different locations, at bends and ditches, to swampy and dry places. You will be amazed!

How many pink shapes did I see until I found one that was almost red. Unfortunately it had already faded when the photographer arrived. It has slightly drooping flowers that bloom crimson pink and turn wine red at the end of the flowering period. I was particularly happy when I found a pure white anemone. They are particularly rare. Its large flowers are so well-shaped and round-leaved that I almost want to call it a noble garden flower. Everything is right about this flower. The foliage is strong and healthy, the stems are taut and upright and even long enough to pick, the flowers are flawless and the growth is tremendous. In favorable places, true giant cushions develop which, when the sun is shining, are covered with countless, pure white, five-mark-sized flower wheels.

Of course, others also collected, probably in other countries too. I’m not thinking of Anemone blanda or appenina, but of all the forms and species that look and grow like a wood anemone, I also mean those that are underground with the fine, so fragile and yet so indestructible ones that are typical of wood anemones Rhizomes grow through the forest humus, wood anemones with bluish or even yellow flowers. I found one at a nursery that even has double flowers.

And all of them, or rather almost all of them, grow quite well in the garden. You just have to leave them happy. You shouldn’t forget them either and in the summer, when they have grown their leaves, you should probably chop or even dig in their places. This doesn’t destroy it, but it does disrupt the even formation of the cushion. Even when weeding, you have to be careful. The best thing to do is pull out the weeds.

Wood anemones are quite undemanding. They even grow best where other plants hardly want to: under a hazel or in a lilac thicket, behind the rhododendrons or between bamboo stalks, in the meadow or by the pond, under a huge copper beech tree or behind a large boulder. They are also easy to transplant at any time of year, provided you can find them when the foliage is gone. But if the delicate rhizomes are exposed to air or even the sun for even a few hours, they die. But there are plastic bags.

Haven’t I forgotten that the fallen leaves under the hazel, lilac and beech trees have to stay put? You see, and because I don’t have a leaf dispenser everywhere I have wood anemones, I go rake.

By the way, I have to quickly repair the cart structure tomorrow. I still know a few ways, there’s still a lot of fallen leaves.