Angel Trumpet Time
We are enjoying a lush flowering of angel trumpets this fall, with their sweetly fragrant, nocturnal flowers. This is the cultivar Brugmansia x candida ‘Double White’, looking quite lovely this week.
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T-Rex is Coming
We’ve long enjoyed the tropical-looking Arailia family genus, Tetrapanax…in spite of it’s root suckering tendancies. You would think that plants that root suckered would be easy to propagate, but that’s interestingly not always the case. The common form of rice paper plant, which dies to the ground each winter in our climate, isn’t a problem,
Ornate Ornata
Over a period of years, we’ve tried three different clones of the Eastern Himalayan (India to Myanmar) native banana, Musa ornata, with no luck getting them to survive. We finally gave up, concluding that it simply wasn’t winter hardy here, living up to its on-line reputation of being a Zone 9-11 plant. That was before
High Flying Loquat
This very rare Japanese selection isn’t the most vigorous loquat we’ve ever grown, but it is one that we weren’t going to give up on until we were able to get it established.
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Remusatia – Unknown and Unloved
We’ve long been fascinated with hardy tuberous aroids, and one that we’ve long-loved and grown are from the little-known genus Remusatia. The genus contains only four species native to a large region spanning from the Himalayas to China.
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If Live Gives you Bananas, Make ’em Orange
When I first read the 2010 paper describing the discovery of an orange-flowered Musella (dwarf yellow banana), I was hopelessly hooked, and my heart filled with lust. Hanging out at 4,000′ elevation in China’s Sichuan province was a previously undiscovered population of only 130 orange-flowered plants, compared the more typical yellow. When you have grown
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Brugman’s Angel Trumpets
One of the more spectacular genera of fall-flowering plants is the tobacco relative, Brugmansia, in the nightshade family, Solanaceae. The genus, Brugmansia, was named in 1805 to honor Sebald Brugmans (1763–1819), a natural history professor at Leiden University, Netherlands. These fragrant flowers are designed to attract pollinators that include large, nocturnal hawkmoths. Below is our clump of
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Anne Bishop is a Late Bloomer
The wonderful ginger lily, Hedychium ‘Anne Bishop’ is making a stunning show in the mid-October garden with it’s incredible display of huge heads of fragrant orange flowers. We’ve never been able to track down the origin of this cultivar, or the identity of this particular Anne S. Bishop. Not only does this put on a
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Crepe Ginger
(aka: Costus speciosus) Hellenia speciosa ‘Wizard of Oz’ is an amazingly winter hardy form of the typically warm tropical, southeast Asian native crepe ginger. This gem is a 2013 Ozzie Johnson collection from near Yan Ming, Vietnam at 3,900′ elevation. Emerging in mid-June (NC), the thick, fleshy green stalks, quickly rise to 6′ tall. The
Red Banana
This October marks our first flowering of Musa aurantiaca, a little-known species from the Arunchal-Pradesch and Assam region of India, into surrounding Myanmar and Tibet. We love that both the flower and developing bananas are both bright red. So far, our plant has sailed through winter temperatures of 11 degree F, with no problems. Thanks