Lunaria annua, an honesty plant, is a popular everlasting plant with many aliases—St. Peter’s penny, money plant, moonwort, and satin flower.
Native to Europe and Western Asia, it belongs to the mustard family and has long been a favorite in old-fashioned gardens for winter bouquets.
Lunaria Annua’s Characteristics
The flat, brown, quarter-inch seeds are sown in a box, and seedlings are set 20” inches apart when average garden soil lias become warm. They need no pampering to grow 3’ feet high, or slightly more.
Its clusters of small, uninteresting, four-petaled lavender flowers come in July and seem to exist only to shatter off, leaving tiny flat, pale green seed pods called pennies.
Time To Pull Up The Honesty Plant
The seedpods increase in size and importance during late summer, and when they have turned from green to beige, it is time to pull up the whole plant by the roots and hang it upside down indoors, where it may dry.
Later, remove the roots and the stalk covering so that the stalk is a smooth hone-white leaving the pods that have now become silvery, satiny white, and tissue-thin.
Releasing Of Seeds
The fully developed pods are 2” inches long, almost broad, flat, and rounded at both ends.
Rub each pod gently between thumb and finger, and the papery, deciduous outer coverings slip off silkily, releasing the seeds and leaving the enduring, gleaming partition called the septum, which originally separated the seed compartments.
This tissue-thin septum is tipped with a persistent style or threadlike point, showing a faint tracery of short fine lines to which the seeds were attached.
The disks gleam faintly indoors, even in the dark, and show up charmingly by daylight or in artificial light against a background of medium blue, Chinese red, or another strongly contrasting color.
44659 by Charlotte B. Norris