Michauxia campanuloides

Recently we took a trip to Oklahoma and had the opportunity to tour a few gardens.  Since it was a daylily meeting garden tour, all the gardens featured daylilies, but the plant that stuck out the most to me, we actually not a daylily.  The plant in question had an interesting white flower, that sort of reminded me of something from the nightshade family or a passion flower.  It clearly wasn’t either of these.  We asked the gentleman who owned the garden we were in, and he couldn’t remember the name of the plant, but told us where he thought he had recently bought it.

A blurry picture of theMichauxia tchihatchewii that started it all.  It was a windy day and hard to get good crisp pictures.

When we got home, we spent a while looking for this plant.  The online nursery where he said he bought it didn’t have anything like it in their inventory and were having little luck searching for it on the internet.  We thought it might be some type of a Silene, but it wasn’t quite right.  Finally I emailed our picture to the nursery and asked if they knew what it was. 

A few days later I got a reply back that they did know what it was, Michauxia tchihatchewii, and that they didn’t have any for sale.  It seems that their plants had died leaving them without a seed source.  Apparently they hadn’t sold it for a few years, so we got lucky, since the gardener had probably bought it somewhere else.

Then we had to locate a plant since the nursery didn’t have any.  An internet search latter only turned up some seeds for sale on eBay.  Not exactly the route we wanted to take.  The Plant Lust website listed a similar plant on it’s page: Michauxia campanuloides.  This one was available online and looked pretty similar, so an order was placed (along with some additional plants since they charged flat shipping rate for four plants).  About a week later our new plant arrived, no worse for the trip.  Now to find the perfect place for it in the garden.

Our new Michauxia campanuloides plant fresh out of the box