Jacob will sleep outside in the cold tonight. That is to say seeds of Jacob’s Ladder. I potted up some seeds and set them in an outdoor growing box, where they will soak up rain, snow, and the cold of an Iowa winter. Next spring they should sprout.
How I met Jacob’s Ladder
A few years ago in April, using binoculars, I spotted the first Jacob’s Ladder of my life. They were blooming on an almost-vertical bluff on the other side of a creek near my home in southeast Iowa. I wanted to see the pale blue flowers up close, but there was no way to get near them. After a lot of searching, I found a single plant on my side of the creek. Small, with only three flowering stems.
I loved the little blue flower on sight. Would it grow in my shady flower garden? I started visiting the plant almost every day, watching for the seeds. After the blossoms faded, seed capsules formed in the calyxes, which looked like miniature paper lanterns.
I enclosed one cluster in an organza drawstring bag while the seeds ripened. When the seed capsules opened, the bag kept the seeds from being lost.
Jacob in the woods
Jacob’s Ladder is native wildflower of eastern North America, a spring ephemeral, which is to say it grows in deciduous woodlands and blooms early. It takes advantage of spring light, before the woods wake up. By the time the trees leaf out, the flowers are finished.
Jacob in the garden
Unlike many spring ephemerals, Jacob’s Ladder’s leaves stay green and fresh all summer, given enough water. That makes it wonderful for a shady garden, because it doesn’t leave a gap when the flowers are finished.
It’s good-looking foliage, too. The compound leaves have opposite leaflets that, if you use a little imagination, resemble the rungs of a ladder. That is how Jacob’s Ladder got its name.
Growing Jacob
I had only a few seeds, so I tried to make them count. Jacob’s Ladder seeds require 60 days of cold stratification before they will germinate. It’s easiest to plant them in the ground outdoors in fall and let nature do the job.
But that would be chancy. Something might eat them, or I might not recognize the seedlings and weed them out. Instead, I put the seeds into an outdoor growing box, where they received nature’s allotment of rain, snow, and cold. (The box is like a cold frame, but with a removable 1/4-inch hardware cloth top, which keeps out rabbits and digging mice and chipmunks.)
When the seeds germinated, I transplanted them to individual pots and tended them in the growing box until they were big enough to plant out or give away. From those seeds, Jacob’s Ladder now grows outside my living room window, and in the gardens of several friends. I still grow it using this method, though it probably would do fine if I simply scattered the seeds.
Who doesn’t like it?
Mammals. Many treasured native plants have fared ill at the teeth of deer and rabbits. Not Jacob’s Ladder. While there is no guarantee that any plant is immune, Jacob’s Ladder is still standing on mornings when other garden plants have been grazed to the ground.
Who does like it?
Bees of many kinds visit when the Jacob’s Ladder is bloom, including bumblebees. A native bee, Andrena polemonii, specializes in flowers of this genus (Polemonium). If you grow Jacob’s Ladder, you could be doing your bit to preserve biodiversity by feeding a bee that depends on a small number of closely related plants.
If Jacob gets these three things that it loves, it’s a wonderful garden flower.
Protection from weeds. Jacob’s Ladder appreciates having the weeds cleared around it. It’s not aggressive, and it shrinks from competition.
Water. With sufficient water, the leaves stay green all summer and into the fall. Otherwise the leaves will pale and look worn.
Shade. Jacob’s Ladder thrives in partial shade from mid spring through summer.
It comes easily from seeds. Once established, a colony will slowly expand from the seeds it drops. Collect some, and you can bestow Jacob’s Ladder on your friends.
I would be interested to hear of other gardeners’ experience with this wildflower. I welcome your comments below.
I am hoping my start you gave me will weather the winter and join my ephemeral garden this year... Jacob's Ladder, in the world of flower essences, opens the awareness to higher powers and the Higher Self.
The very sparse and scattered woodlands up in the NW corner of Iowa have their share of Jacob's Ladder as well, and interestingly the past 3 years of drought here (we are in the "Extreme" designation) have not seemed to stifle what populations we find. However, and this may seem contrary, our Deer population up here do seem to be hard on these spring ephemerals as they are on others...I suspect it may be just too little of habitat and too high of numbers of larger browsing wildlife(?). If the habitat were more robust and prevalent, perhaps that would not be as noticeable?