Pros:
- Massive quantities of flowers for about 3 months
- Bees love the blooms
- The plant doesn’t need any care to thrive
- We’ve transplanted a few of the seedlings. They’re true to their parent in terms of color, but the parents seems like a double bloom and the children seem like single bloom
- If you want a hedge, this seems like a good option
Cons:
- Seeds! So many seeds. Each of its hundreds (thousands?) of flowers will produce 10+ seeds. They all don’t germinate, but it’s a numbers game. If you want to avoid pulling volunteers up you’re best off pulling the seed pods off the plant before they open on their own
I pulled ~2 gallons of seed pods off a week prior to this picture. My wife dumped them in the compost, so no epic 5+ gallon photo 😭
Seeds in the compost? I hope you got them early, or that compost heap will be smothered next spring!
Thankfully the seeds don’t seem very robust. This is year three of just tossing them into the pile and none have grown in it so far.
It’s, uh, self-nitrogenising compost.