Honesty

I'm talking the plant, not the facet of moral character. It's also called Lunaria, which means "moon-like" in latin and which refers to the decorative seedpods.  It's a biennial, so it flowers every other year, in the springtime.

Once it finishes flowering, it forms flat, silver dollar-sized seed pods, which eventually dry out.  At this point, we harvested the plants, pulling them up by the roots, and hanging them upside down from the rafters of the garage until they were completely dried out.

Today, CC removed the papery "shells" from either side of the the silvery membranes that hold the seeds and I swept up the shells and seeds and spread them throughout the garden for next year's crop.  We then brought the dried plants inside for arrangements.  They are quite simple and elegant and monochromatic, so they look good in a wide variety of containers.  Once you start them in the garden, you will have them for a very long time, as long as you remember to cast the seeds around at the end of every summer.