We've been working in the gardens and Fred pruned out one of our ornamental apple trees that has seen better times.  In the process, I harvested most of the silver dollar plants that have sprung up in surprising places.  I like having a few each year so I'll have some for dry flower arrangements, but for whatever reason, this year I've had more than I want to cope with - and I don't really want them to reseed like crazy.  Of course, in the process of cutting/pulling them, lots of the seeds escaped, but I'll deal with that next spring.  I often don't recognize them until the pretty purple flowers come, and then I sort of forget them until suddenly there they are - those muddy looking disks ready to split open and let more seeds drop.


So here's the thing.  If you'd like to have some - with or without seeds, I've left a pile of them by our mailbox.  Feel free to take as many as you want.  Be sure to enclose them in a large bag of some sort or you'll have seeds all over the place.  They are very dry and ready for the wind to distribute. All you have to do is slide the outer coverings off each disk - it isn't hard, just a little timer consuming - and you'll have seeds to plant  if you want to grow some yourself, and a pretty addition to your dry flower arrangements.  If you decide to plant some seeds, put them someplace where you don't mind if they look a bit bedraggled because they are very pretty for a week or so in the spring when they bloom, but by this time of year, they aren't so pretty.  Here are some pictures.   Top is how they look when they are "ripe" and ready to drop their seeds.  The middle picture shows a few of the disks bright and silvery because both outer coverings that hold the seeds in place have come off, and you can see the round brown seeds on the cement.  After I slid both outer layers off each disk, the bottom picture shows how pretty they look. 

I spread lots of seeds down by the road where the lupines grow each spring, hoping they may take hold there and lend some variety.  I think I may have done that before, but if I did, they apparently didn't "take."