Honesty

Did you know

• After flowering, honesty produces flat round seedpods that ripen into translucent silver disks like full moons—the pods are the real glory of the plant, not the flowers.
• Also called 'silver dollar plant' and 'moonwort,' the dried seedpods look like perfectly polished coins—Renaissance Europeans believed they had magical wealth-attracting properties.
• The Latin 'Lunaria' means 'moon-like' for the silvery seedpods—they're a beloved ingredient in everlasting bouquets and were used by 17th-century Dutch flower painters as a symbol of light.
• Honesty flowers smell faintly of vanilla in the evening and are pollinated by orange-tip butterflies, who lay their eggs on the leaves—the larvae eat only mustard family plants.
• John Gerard, the famous English Tudor herbalist, called honesty 'pricksongs' because the pods resembled the round notes of medieval music notation.

Color meanings

Uses

• Cottage gardens
• Dried flowers
• Cut flowers
• Naturalizing