Plant hitchhikers that just refuse to be left behind

A while ago I very much enjoyed an article by Helen Dillon in which she mused on the challenges and opportunities presented by downsizing from her much-admired Dublin garden, and home of 44 years, to a smaller property.
                                             

Much of her article was concerned with the plants she intends to take with her and, even more interestingly, those she plans to leave behind. Among the plants she’s had enough of is the purple-leaved lesser celandine, Ficaria verna ‘Brazen Hussy’, although she admits that it will probably hitch a lift on some plant or other and turn up in the new garden, whether she likes it or not.

I sympathise; during my recent move from one end of the country to the other, I brought a few plants with me. Not very many, mainly because I knew that in the short term there was nowhere to put them, but even so I was impressed by how many unintended hitchhikers I had also brought with me. These include foxgloves, forget-me-nots, opium and Welsh poppies, dog violets and assorted aquilegias.

While returning from a walk in the national park, I would occasionally drop in at Steve’s nursery to say hello. On one of these occasions, Steve scraped some green stuff off a lump of tufa and said ‘Here, have some of this’. ‘This’ turned out to be Mentha requienii, by far the smallest and also most charming of the mints; a native of Italy, Sardinia and Corsica, it’s usually known as Corsican mint. Barely 1 cm tall, it bears a superficial resemblance to mind-your-own-business (Soleirolia soleirolii), but is a superior plant in every way, with tiny mauve flowers and a pungent mint smell.