Ribes, Really!

Ribes are my new favorite plants! For the moment they replace Cleveland sage at the top of my list. Here is a sage growing in the wild near home. I also have it growing in the yard, of course! And I have propagated it so that when the mother plant was gone, I had a replacement. Now my mother plant and the replacement are gone, but I could get a descendant from a cutting I gave to a friend. That is how great Cleveland sage is. Easy to grow, bees love it, birds love the cover in winter, the sagey smell is lovely...

But now I have a new love. Ribes. Actually there are many. It is the family of currants and gooseberries. Ribes sanguineum is the picture in the header of the blog. I have two of these. They are very small, but blooming their heads off. In the same area of the yard I have three golden currants (ribes aureum). They are really small and are not blooming. When they do bloom, I hope they look like the one on this page from Las Pilitas Nursery.

I now have a new kind of currant for the shade in the front yard . Ribes viburnifolium is a low, spreading (don't worry EE, not like ivy!) evergreen shrub. (I think you can see a picture of one on the Las Pilitias page.) I will be planting it in the front yard under the oak. It will be on the slope behind my other ribes favorite, the wickedly spiked ribes speciosum (fuchsia flowering gooseberry). I currrently have two of the three gooseberries I planted this past summer. I planted three to test how well they do but one was uprooted by some animal. My plan is to have about six of these along the fence in front. Aren't they great?
Just look at the spikes! I took these pictures at last year's native plant tour and knew I had to have these! The flowers are pretty, too. They are the picture in the header of the Town Mouse Country Mouse blog.

So now I have three kinds of currants and one kind of gooseberry--all different versions of Ribes.