This beautiful plant (whose religious name is Mary’s heart) was flowering when we first looked at our house. A year later, I read about the bleeding heart in Karen Andreola’s A Charlotte Mason Companion.

My children delight in the little heart-shaped flowers. In the spring and early summer, Brendan plucks a little heart everytime he goes out the front door. He has been doing this for the past four years and I wonder whether he will ever tire of picking these flowers.

The bleeding heart requires virtually no care. I simply remove the dead leaves and branches in the fall or winter and the plant grows back beautifully the following spring.