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Honesty Overview
| DESCRIPTION | You may know honesty by another name; it has a few: money plant, silver dollar, or dollar plant. An easy-to-grow biennial, honesty blooms the second season after planting. Plants self-seed with gusto and come back year after year. Honesty’s purple flower clusters debut in spring, adding color after the spring bulbs have faded. |
| GENUS NAME | Lunaria annua |
| COMMON NAME | Honesty |
| PLANT TYPE | Perennial |
| LIGHT | Part Sun, Sun |
| HEIGHT | 1 to 3 feet |
| WIDTH | 1 to 2 feet |
| FLOWER COLOR | Purple |
| FOLIAGE COLOR | Blue/Green |
| SEASON FEATURES | Spring Bloom, Summer Bloom |
| SPECIAL FEATURES | Cut Flowers, Fragrance, Low Maintenance |
| ZONES | 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 |
| PROPAGATION | Seed |
| PROBLEM SOLVERS | Drought Tolerant |
Garden Plans For Honesty
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Planting Honesty
Honesty is grown both for its spring flowers and its round seedpods that are cut, dried, and used in arrangements. Combine honesty with other flowers that produce attractive dried blossoms for a cutting garden with an everlasting impact. Great annuals for drying include globe amaranth, love-lies-bleeding, cockscomb, strawflower, annual statice, bells-of-Ireland, love-in-a-mist, starflower, Chinese lanterns, and mealycup sage. Perennials that preserve well include blazing star, globe thistle, yarrow, and German statice.
How to Grow Honesty
Honesty is easy to grow in moist, organically rich soil and full sun or part shade. Sow seeds outdoors in spring as soon as the ground can be worked, then cover them lightly with soil. Honesty will produce green, leafy growth the first year then flowers and seeds the second year. It takes about 18 months to go from planting honesty seeds to cutting and drying a new crop of silver dollar-size seedpods.
These aren’t any old plain brown seedspod, by the way. Honesty seedpods are shimmery, translucent, long-lasting additions to dried flower arrangements. To dry the seedpods, cut the stems close to the ground after they turn green, being careful not to knock off the seedpods. Tie 10 to 15 stems together and hang them upside down to dry in a dark, airy place for two to three weeks or until stems and seedpods turn golden brown. Gently rub off the brown husks from the sides of seedpods.
