My Grandmother's Money Plants

I was introduced to the money plant by my beautiful English Grandmother who had them in her many, MANY perennial gardens. As a kid I loved playing with the coins from the money plants in her yard. I couldn't even tell you, or give words to what made this particular flowering plant magical to me as a child but I adored them (it may have simply been it's name). I couldn't have cared less about the lovely little purple flowers in springtime, I just wanted those awesome coins!

Many of the plants around our yard were given to me by my Grandmother. All of my hostas, the now giant wild rose bush, those darn yellow flowers that ate virtually all the other perennials, a neat delicate perennial that I thought was gone but I managed to salvage when I was cleaning up the beds this year (I'll have to figure out what it's called), and two large bunches of Autumn Joy that I don't even cut back in the fall because I like the way it looks all winter (I cut them back in spring instead). I really cherish the plants in my yard that came from my Grandmother's garden.

Well, last spring a strange looking "weed" showed up behind our house. The leaves on it looked sort of similar to a pumpkin or squash type leaf but it was so hearty and bulky looking that I was actually a bit worried it was a toxic plant or that darn hogweed that showed up in Michigan quite recently. I left it hoping that maybe somehow pumpkin got planted behind my house. It wasn't pumpkin but this spring it came back in mass. I posted a photo of it online to a gardening shop around here asking what it might be before I tried to eradicate it. Well the shop never got back to me but two of my friends saw that I'd posted it and chimed in with their thoughts. One said she was pretty sure it was a money plant. I told her that it didn't produce any coins last year so that didn't seem practical. Then she told me that they only give coins every other year. The virdict is in and I absolutely have a big bunch of money plants directly behind my house.

These magical beauties are not from my Grandmother's garden but as she's looking down on me each year while I work away in the yard and try to preserve the plants she gave me I think she saw fit to put a patch of money plants behind my house after all, knowing how much I loved them as a child.

These were not here two years ago

Thank-you Grandmother

Money plant "coins" (photo from cherrygal.com)

Not only do I now have a plant that I simply adore in my yard, one that will remind me of my Grandmother every time I look at it, but it was free (seeing as it planted itself), and now my son will have the pleasure of growing up and playing with the coins from our money plants just like I played with the coins from my grandparent's plants. This is just one of those simple things in life that I find truly an enormous blessing and a thing to smile about for ages to come!

My grandparents and my mom's oldest sister