If you are a gardener and you do not have Japanese lanterns planted in your garden, think twice before adding them. These plants produce beautiful green leaves and in time produce the most beautiful orange “lantern”. However the roots are trailers and will take over any where you plant them. I wish the person who had given me some had shared this tidbit with me as I planted them in my wildflower garden.
The whole purpose of a wild flower garden was to plant all perennial plants so I did not have to weed and would only thin plants out as needed. I weed the new Japanese lantern plants more than any other weeding in my yard. I have tried digging them out. I have tried spraying the new plants with weed killer. We have even tilled the entire garden down to the clay base and restarted but these things must be in the clay and all the way through the earth to the other side as they always come back.
So while I do enjoy harvesting that beautiful stem with the lanterns, bunching and displaying them all over in vases with some other fall flowers, I do not enjoy having to weed them continuously. Heed my warning if you dare to plant these 🙂
chase n chance ranch 