From a tattered envelope, a garden treasure

Sometimes the greatest garden treasures come in the most nondescript packages. And the treasure that showed up last week was in an envelope that looked like it saw the floor of more than one post office on the way to my mailbox, crumbled, filthy and I’m pretty sure there was a footprint on it.

If you’ve seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the Ark of the Covenant is opened, you can imagine the scene as I opened that sad envelope. As the golden glow dimmed, I saw the words “Syneilesis ‘Houou’” and I knew I’d received something special

I’d first seen Syneilesis ‘Houou’ about a month before when a casual scroll through a social media site stopped me in my tracks. The photos showed a bright green plant with dark-veined leaves bigger than a large hand with frilly, deeply lobed leaves, and it had my heart thumping. They were posted by a well-known plant breeder in Michigan, but they weren’t something he’d bred, it was a plant grown from seed, and as far as I can tell, that’s the only way you’ll be able to grow it because no one is producing it.

Some gardeners will be familiar with the straight species Syneilesis aconitifolium, which has a most descriptive common name — shredded umbrella plant.

Its broad leaves look just like an umbrella that had a bad day, and it is a lovely shade plant that provides an amazing texture contrast. It produces small, white flowers on wiry stems that rise above the 18-inch mound of foliage, but the charm of this plant is all about the leaves.

One of its most interesting phases is when it first appears in spring. Fuzzy tips emerge from the soil looking a little bit like a hatching alien that you might see in “Star Trek.” They are the oddest looking part of the early spring garden.

Like many woodland-edge plants, it grows best in soil that is rich in organic matter with good drainage, but I’ve found that it is drought tolerant with time. It clumps up slowly by rhizomes, which also make it appropriate for division down the line.

Shredded umbrella plant is available at many garden centers, although for some reason it’s harder to find than it probably should be because it truly is an excellent plant for shady spots.

I have a few shredded umbrella plants in my garden, but none are as flamboyant as ‘Houou,’ so it would be a thrill to grow it and why I was so excited to find the seeds in that beaten up envelope.

My seed benefactor turned out not to be the plant breeder who had posted the photos but a gardening friend who had more guts than I do and asked that plant breeder if he had any seeds to spare, then was nice enough to share some with me.

They’ve been sowed indoors and have a front row seat under the grow light, where I hope to turn that little bag of seeds that showed up in a tattered envelope into a true garden treasure.