Bleeding Heart

I've never met anyone who sees a bleeding heart for the first time and isn't slightly astonished. Those rows of perfect, heart-shaped flowers dangling from arching stems like a string of lockets — they're so precisely formed they barely look real. Someone once told me they looked like earrings designed by an Art Nouveau jeweller, and I've never been able to unsee it.

Lamprocapnos spectabilis — botanists recently changed it from Dicentra, which I refuse to get used to — is a spring woodland plant, which means it likes dappled shade and cool, moist soil. It emerges in April with gorgeous ferny foliage and then those extraordinary drooping sprays of pink-and-white hearts appear, and suddenly your shady corner is the best thing in the garden.

The flowers are extraordinarily intricate if you look closely. Each heart has an outer layer of pink and an inner drop of white — the 'tear' or 'blood drop' that gives it the common name. They're slightly translucent in the light, which gives them an otherworldly quality.

By midsummer the whole plant dies back and disappears underground, which catches people out if they're not expecting it. But that's the deal with spring ephemerals — they arrive, they dazzle, they leave. I plant late-season perennials nearby to fill the gap, and spend the rest of the year looking forward to seeing those hearts come back.